For those people interested in Theory of Constraints, there are some nice videos out there that describe the idea and the impact this way of thinking can have.
A lot of what TOC’s ideas provide is a way to help people focus. This video from amdocs is a both a high-level description of Critical Chain Project Management and a great way to get a sense of the impact on how people think about their work differently.
And then there are the TOC Thinking Processes that help people focus on what they are trying to do. Used together, they are a whole set of tools that take you from Goals to Current Reality to Future Reality to the Transition to that new reality. Philip Marris recently published a series of 7 videos with Bill Dettmer, author of The Logical Thinking Processes (my review) and longtime TOC writer and thinker. The series is probably all from one interview, broken into digestible chunks that talks about the full suite of TOC thinking processes (in Bill’s terms). The interviewer is Erik Mano.
The sequence of the Thinking Tools is always interesting to me. Dettmer adds a Goal Tree that describes the goal of the overall system, which then helps frame the following pieces (part 2). The Current Reality Tree helps people think through the underlying cause(s) behind challenges to reaching the goal (part 3). Evaportating Clouds (conflict clouds) help individuals and organizations think through all sorts of conflicts, but in the context of this series it is the Change vs. Don’t Change conflict analysis (part 4). From here you can build the Future Reality Tree (FRT) to take in the injections developed in the problem-solving process and check whether they will produce the desired results AND that they don’t create new undesired results - also known as preventing negative branches (part 5). With that together, the team can build a plan to get to the new solution with the Prerequisite Tree (part 6). The Thinking Processes are frequently used for problem resolution, but they can equally be used to formulate a strategy to reach a new level of performance (part 7).