The Goal: a process of Ongoing Improvement

DW: Why? What kind of help were you looking for?
AV: Let me put it this way. I was literally sitting in my office, with my head
in my hands, highly frustrated, with piles of paper all around me, going
through correspondence. I opened a letter, saw that it was another invitation
to a course, threw it away, and as I threw it in my wastepaper basket my eye
caught the price of this particular course. It was the South African equivalent
of about $18,000. That caught my attention. I thought if any course was
worth that amount it was worth looking at. This was a two-week course in
production management; the invitation was addressed to the engineering
faculty. It had gotten to the medical faculty by mistake. The course was
actually offered free to university professors. So because of my deep
frustration with some of the management issues I had in my department, and
because I had some time off the next week, I phoned. I planned to only go for
the first week, because this was the time I had available. I was told that I had
to attend the full two-week course. I said, “Yeah, we’ll see about that.”
DW: But you went?
AV: I went the first week. The course was taught with reference to a
production environment and the logic around it. Now you don’t find much of

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this logic—the reality trees and that sort of thing—in 
The Goal
. Quite a lot of
that is in 
It’s Not Luck
, which was published later. But the logic grabbed me
because I was this frustrated man who was running a department of medicine
and I had not been trained to do that. I had no insight into management
issues. Suddenly I saw that here was a potential way of analyzing my
department.
DW: What were the parallels?
AV: My department was in chaos, total chaos. Everything coming and going,
not knowing what was what—much as things were in the factory that is the
setting of
 The Goal
. During the course, 
The Goal
was mentioned. I bought it,
read it through in one night, and I thought to myself, that’s 
my
environment.
A chaotic system is not necessarily a factory. It could be a hospital with
people coming and going. It could be a department with a whole lot of prima
donnas—the doctors—who need to be managed. That parallel struck me.
Now if I can answer your question a bit more precisely. When one is
introduced to Theory of Constraints, the first thing you see is a system where
the causality is hidden. In other words, it’s chaotic. Things happen, you have
no control. Suddenly, though, it becomes a system that can be analyzed in
terms of certain key points—leverage points. And one learns that addressing
these key points—rather than launching a symptomatic firefight—is the way
to exert control over these systems. Remember, this was in the early 1990s,
before frameworks like systems theory had moved to the forefront and
become part of the main buzz. Though the Theory of Constraints doesn’t talk
about systems theory, already it was offering an approach by which a
complex system could be managed in terms of a few key leverage points.