Tom Kemp 1213997812|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
I was lucky enough a year or so ago to have a few minutes conversation with Eli Goldratt. I was asking him about what he thought the fundamental elements of the Theory of Constraints might be. I was trying to get his opinion about a thought that dependency is the elementary particle of TOC. (After all, logical implication, the basis of the Thinking Processes, is simply dependence between propositions and complex organizations are only complex because of dependencies between tasks being executed).
However, he just came back with another question: "What are the conservations laws of the Theory of Constraints?". I thought I was in for a Socratic dialogue and mentally geared up but he then professed that he had no idea what they were but that they must exist.
At this point we were being called back to the seminar he was presenting and the question just hung in the air. I mulled over it every now and again over the next few weeks and tried to understand a) what a conservation law is; b) why at least one "must" exist; c) how to find one.
The familiar high school conservation law is that of linear momentum. How many rocks have been hypothetically thrown out of the back of how many boats to show that total mass x velocity of the system remains the same. Similarly, we were told that ice skaters spin faster when they pull their arms in because they conserve angular momentum. Finally, we all know the law of conservation of energy: that energy just gets transformed but does not disappear from the system as a whole. Conservation is about something staying the same even though other things change.
Why must conservation laws exist in human organizations (the most important domain of the Theory of Constraints)? If nothing gets conserved then we surely have chaos and, in particular, unpredictability (as I'll discuss in a moment): changing one aspect of a system does not constrain another part of the system. Well, we know that's not true! We also know that humans and the organizations they exist in are far from unpredictable, which is why we are allowed to analyze them in a rigorous, scientific way. Properties of these organizations must be conserved.
How can we find TOC's versions of conservation laws? I started with a feeble approach by thinking about the logic we all rely on to exist with each other. At all times we all have a complete (ie conserved) logical foundation underpinning our beliefs about the way things are. If a fact changes to challenge those beliefs then we dismiss the fact or juggle our underlying assumptions to accommodate it. I was playing with the idea that this scales up to an organization-wide level where organizations we are trying to help predictably change the way they understand the world in the face of TOC's impeccable reasoning. However, this was all just arm-waving and not well thought-through.
So I started looking for the meaning of conservations laws in physics and came across a lovely theorem by the mathematician, Emmy Noether, who proved, in 1915, that if a system has certain simple properties that any symmetry found in that system leads to a conservation law. I'm not a pure mathematician so I haven't been through the proof or fully understand the statement of the theorem yet. Symmetry exists in a system if the system can be transformed in some way but the system appears exactly the same after the transformation as before, such as rotating a square by 90 degrees.
When we look at particular examples of her theorem, such as the law of the conservation of linear momentum, then things start to look just a bit more understandable to someone without a background in group theory. There is a something called a 'Hamiltonian' which is a description of a physical system in terms of its kinetic energy and its potential energy. If you throw a ball to me then its potential energy increases as it goes higher (it receives gravitational potential energy) and as it moves towards me its kinetic energy changes as its velocity changes. Something in physics called the 'Principle of Least Action' says that if the ball has to reach me in a certain time then the parabola it follows in the air is fixed and predictable: the difference between its potential energy and its kinetic energy is always a minimum.
Now, this language appeals to me. I'm nowhere near finding TOC analogies for these concepts but the seed is there: what is the potential or kinetic energy of a human system; is there a principle of least action which means things are highly predictable; what are the symmetries of a human system; and so on.
In snatches of spare time, I'm slowly trying to understand how these things work in physics in the hope that it gives me enough intuition to transfer the ideas to the arena we work in.
