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A Guide to Implementing the Theory of
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PowerPoint Presentations There are
currently 7 PowerPoint presentations available online to anyone, the
remainder are for client use only.
The first two
public presentations deal with fundamental issues of modern organizations
(industrial or service). The third is
a reformulation of the lieutenant’s cloud, it builds upon knowledge in the
second presentation and offers additional hints at constructing systemic
clouds. The fourth is a short
collection of common needs that are found over a wide range of systemic
clouds. The fifth presentation is
about the fundamentals of systemic production. The sixth follows on from production. Now that we can produce things with
excellent DIFOT, we ought to make sure we are also making money as well. The seventh presentation was found in draw
where it had languished for some time and deserves a wider audience. Each
presentation is explained in more detail below and the link takes you to a
starting page from where you can download the presentation. There is a
fundamental paradox that underlies the Theory of Constraints. It is not the dilemma of global vs local;
but rather the underlying drivers of that dilemma. It has to do with our own psychology, and
our own experience. To understand this
paradox is to understand how to implement Theory of Constraints. After all, a paradox can only exist because
the logic of what to do is different from what we expect. This paradox has not been articulated
before. It is presented here in the
form of a self-pacing PowerPoint presentation. It draws upon the neurological levels model
of Robert Dilts and Gregory Bateson, with a liberal helping from a past
Christmas edition of the Economist.
You can download this presentation from here; Values, Beliefs, &
Industrialization. Once you have
viewed the first PowerPoint, I hope that you will better understand why
common sense isn’t apparently so common.
However, there is more that can be built into this understanding. Here is a follow-up PowerPoint; Logical Types, Clouds, and
Fantasies. Here I seek to show that it is an error of
logical typing that causes the fundamental paradox that we observed
above. This draws upon the work of
Gregory Bateson on logical levels, Elliott Jaques on hierarchy, and Jerry
Harvey on negative fantasies. There is
a very nice commonality between each of these approaches. The
lieutenant’s cloud is an approach that seeks to identify and break
misalignments between responsibility and authority. Oftentimes subordinates are given
responsibility but not always the requisite authority to carry out their
roles. When we fail to address this
misalignment we create the conditions necessary for continual fire-fighting,
hence the other name of this cloud – the fire fighting cloud. The lieutenants
cloud/fire fighting cloud is, however, simply another variant of a system
cloud. The lieutenants cloud/fire fighting cloud is a system cloud
upside-down. In order to see and
understand its systemic applicability, we need a Reformulated Lieutenant’s Cloud
that is essentially downside-up. All the knowledge that is necessary to
understand this is presented in the earlier two PowerPoints. I think that there is a great deal of
utility in understanding the Reformulated Lieutenant’s Cloud. Paradoxically, if you find that you are
continually using it, then systemic solutions are evading you. A short and
sweet presentation follows in A Suite of Systemic Clouds. There are a number of common
pairs of needs (or B-C’s in the jargon) that are useful in understanding what
flavor of systemic cloud you are dealing with. A systemic
cloud is, as I see it, a kind of lock that sits between where we are now and
where we want to be in the future, all we need is the key. We can open the lock on a case-by-case
basis by examining the erroneous assumptions in the cloud or we can open it
once-and-for-all by supplying a key.
Here is one of the keys; Drum Buffer Rope & Systemic
Production. This is a big file, about 7 Mb, due to my
use of a base diagram with a large number of elements in it. I hope that it is worth your patience in
downloading. If we are
going to use a systemic approach such as drum-buffer-rope, or critical chain,
or replenishment and distribution, then we ought also to use a systemic
approach to management accounting.
Anything less is fraught with danger.
Throughput Accounting – Systemic
Accounting introduces
the key elements of this approach and shows how any process can be improved
just by looking afresh at the management accounting using this approach. Found
languishing in a drawer, this presentation ought to be somewhere where more
people can see it. It is a graphical
summary of Bill Dettmer’s approach to strategy formulation as put forward in
his book Strategic Navigation. Take a look, even if
your interest isn’t strategy, it will show you the interrelationships that
exist between the various Thinking Process tools. Thinking Processes For Strategy This Webpage Copyright © 2008-2009 by Dr K. J.
Youngman |