by Bartley Madden
Last
annotated on December 28, 2014
INTRODUCTION
The first core belief is that past experiences shape our current
assumptions. Through our assumptions about how the world works, we participate
in creating what we perceive as our reality.
The second core belief is that language is perception’s silent
partner—silent in the sense that we are mostly unaware of the powerful
influence of language.
The third core belief is concerned with systems thinking: how to improve
system performance by identifying and fixing a system’s key constraints.
The fourth core belief is that human behavior is purposeful, and that it
can be productively analyzed as a living control system. Instead of viewing
behavior as a response to an external stimulus, an alternative perspective is
that we compare our actual experiences to our preferred experiences and take
actions in an attempt to create new experiences closer to what is preferred.
The control-system perspective explains, among other things, why
compensation/incentive systems often do not work well.
CHAPTER 1 SHAPING THE WORLD YOU SEE
So what exactly is a worldview? Basically, it’s a part of, and a result
of, one’s process of building knowledge. It represents the ideas and beliefs
with which one sees, interprets, and interacts with the world. But if we don’t know a
person’s goal, we can mistakenly believe that we understand his or her
behavior. The impact of worldviews on our performance when dealing with
problems is subtle, yet profoundly important. We participate in
shaping the world that each of us sees as real.
CHAPTER 2 WORLDVIEWS
Core Belief 1: Past experiences
shape assumptions
Core Belief 1: Our perceptions are rooted in assumptions that are based on what has
proved useful in the past and are typically based on an application of linear
cause-and-effect analysis (if X, then Y). However, an automatic reliance on our
assumptions can inadvertently lead to bad decisions, especially so whenever a
significant change in context occurs.
The hidden assumptions revolve around the definition of “a store.” In
Sam Walton’s worldview, each store was an integrated part of a networked
system. For Kmart management, each store was viewed as a stand-alone operation
in which the store manager controlled product selection, ordering, pricing, and
the like.
scientific mindset and three main approaches used by economists to build
knowledge.
The first approach is to analyze the historical record in order to make
sense of the major economic experiences of societies over long periods of time.
The second approach involves computerized lab experiments in order to isolate
the impact of key variables that are not easily, if at all, measurable in the
everyday world. The third approach focuses on designing innovative ways to run
field experiments that can provide compelling evidence to support or reject the
validity of an assumption.
Without our conscious awareness, our brains utilize past experiences
when shaping our perceptions of the external environment—the world “out
there”—as well as when making assumptions about how events and experiences will
occur in the future.
The process of knowledge-building often requires identifying strongly
held, and perhaps subconscious, assumptions—some of which may be faulty.
Studies pertaining to past events are likely to reflect the preconceived
beliefs of the researcher. To counteract this tendency, the researcher needs to
practice the scientific mindset of subjecting data to alternative explanations.
Laboratory experiments and field experiments are valuable tools to help
us better understand cause and effect, which in turn can strengthen our
decision-making abilities.
CHAPTER 3 REALITY IS LANGUAGE-BASED
Core belief 2: Language is
perception’s silent partner
English, like most Western languages, is rooted in linear cause-and-effect,
noun-verb-noun sentence construction.
Core Belief 2: Our perceptions, our thinking, and our use of language are intertwined
to such a degree that unraveling the assumptions behind the words can be a
useful step in building knowledge. This also facilitates a creative use of
language to generate new opportunities for a future unshackled from obsolete
assumptions.
Language subtly shapes the world we see and its use can easily
oversimplify complex relationships to a degree that interferes with developing
innovative solutions to problems.
How we use language in developing and communicating ideas is crucial to
overcoming preconceived faulty beliefs as well as testing new assumptions.
The prototyping process used by designers has a far wider use to all of
us: the process utilizes a specific kind of language to express ideas and
generate fast feedback.
A better future is more readily achieved by discarding language that
cements us to a status-quo past environment and, instead, using language
attuned to new possibilities.
CHAPTER 4 SYSTEMS THINKING
Core Belief 3: Improve performance
by identifying and fixing a system’s key constraints
Core Belief 3: Systems thinking is invaluable as a means to complement linear
cause-and-effect analysis applied to isolated components of a system, to
address the tendency toward an excessive focus on local efficiencies that can
easily degrade overall system performance, and to powerfully identify and focus
on fixing the key constraints to achieving the system goal.
A system is a group of interdependent components, typically having
complex feedback loops, that form a unified whole with a common purpose, such
as the human body or a business firm.
Systems thinking is a way to understand and communicate about the
dynamic complexities and interdependencies involved.1 In many complex systems
(such as ecological ones like rainforests), when you have nonlinear
cause-and-effect relationships with varying time lags and multiple feedback
loops, a simplified, linear cause-and-effect analysis is insufficient for
predicting a system’s behavior. The whole system behaves in ways that cannot be
reduced to just an analysis of isolated system components.
five key lean principles as follows: “precisely specify value by
specific product, identify the value stream for each product, make value flow
without interruptions, let the customer pull value from the producer, and
pursue perfection.”
TOC thinking processes. In the most fundamental terms, the primary TOC
objective is to answer three questions: (1) What to change? (2) Change to what?
(3) How to cause the change?
This is a departure from standard approaches to problem-solving,
especially those seen in economics and finance that set up a problem as one of
maximizing some variable given existing constraints. Goldratt was adamant that
such compromises, based on accepting constraints, should be avoided. Instead,
one should devise logical maps to help generate insights, enabling one to
dissolve conflicts and any related compromises.
Because simplified, linear cause-and-effect analysis has proved so
useful in our lives, we tend to apply it to components of a complex system
while automatically assuming that improvement in a component will translate
into improvement in the performance of the overall system. This may not be
true—especially so when system components are highly dependent upon each other
and when the improvement is made to a component that is not the key constraint
impeding the system’s performance.
An overall systems view that focuses attention on relationships among
components can reveal insights for potential changes that would not be
discovered if one focused only on improving the local efficiencies of a
system’s individual components.
The worldwide adoption of lean/theory-of-constraints thinking by
manufacturing firms and, increasingly, by service firms is a testament to the
usefulness of a systems-oriented worldview.
CHAPTER 5 HUMAN CONTROL SYSTEMS
Core Belief 4: Behavior is control
of perception
Core Belief 4: Human behavior is purposeful, so it can be productively analyzed as a
living control system that acts to maintain the perceptions of important
variables as close as possible to preferred levels. In short, behavior is
control of perception. A control perspective reveals the underlying weakness in
viewing the world primarily as stimulus-response experiences.
Simple linear cause-and-effect analysis masks the fundamental operation
of a control system; when applied to human behavior, it can easily result in
illusory research findings.
Perception is the way our brain experiences the world. What you perceive
is not the object “out there”; instead, you’re receiving a set of neural
signals that your brain utilizes to “serve up” a representation of the object.
Living organisms have purposes: to control the variables that are
important to them. They behave so that their perception of a controlled
variable moves closer to their reference setting for that variable.
In the 1800s, the French physiologist Claude Bernard noted that the
stability of an organism’s internal environment is the means for living in an
environment of varying conditions.
His conceptual insight later evolved into the understanding of homeostatic
control systems, which use a sensor, a comparator that includes a desired range
for the sensed variable, and an effector to act on the environment.
A control system controls what it senses—what it perceives. Controlling
means producing repeatable consequences through variable actions.
we vary our behavior in order to control perceptions that matter to us:
behavior is control of perception.
Perception is how our mind experiences the world. What we perceive
affects what we do and what we do affects what we perceive.
In contrast to non-living things, living organisms have purposes. We
behave in ways to keep our perceptions of important variables—our goals—close
to where we want them to be. Behavior is control of perception.
If we disregard control variables, we can falsely conclude that we know
what a person is doing by simply observing his or her actions.
Negative feedback control is pervasive in living organisms, and is a
means by which to efficiently orchestrate actions to achieve desired perceptions.
Perceptual Control Theory (PCT) helps us as humans—with our “bundled”
body and brain—to understand how we function as hierarchically organized
control systems. Higher levels set goals for lower levels by sending reference
signals, perceptual goals.
When people working together have sharply different high-level goals,
conflict is to be expected. When their high-level goals are similar, expect
cooperation.
We improve our worldviews by understanding human behavior from the
inside out: by acknowledging that people have goals and take actions in order
to control their environment in ways that enable them to achieve their goals.
This way of thinking avoids seemingly plausible but perhaps flat-out misleading
conclusions that the cause of what a person is doing is merely a response to a
stimulus in the external environment.
CHAPTER 6 A CASE STUDY: FREE TO
CHOOSE MEDICINE
Our current drugs-to-patients system, developed over the last fifty
years, has been guided by the FDA’s demands for more and more extensive
clinical testing. Historically, changes to the system have been incremental and
always implemented by the FDA itself. If we continue down this path, we will
most assuredly not achieve order-of-magnitude improvement in the
drugs-to-patients system.
However, once information about the benefits of Free To Choose Medicine
is more widely disseminated, perhaps the many groups fighting for incremental
change within the current FDA environment will raise their sights and back Free
To Choose Medicine.
CHAPTER 7 WORLDVIEWS AND EDUCATION
Increasingly, emphasis is shifting to the notion that it is ideas, not
objects, that poor countries lack.
Core Belief 1: Past experiences shape assumptions. Our perceptions are rooted in
assumptions that are based on what has proved useful in the past and are
typically based on an application of linear cause-and-effect analysis (if X,
then Y). However, an automatic reliance on our assumptions can inadvertently
lead to bad decisions, especially so whenever a significant change in context
occurs.
Core Belief 2: Language is perception’s silent partner. Our perceptions, our thinking,
and our use of language are intertwined to such a degree that unraveling the
assumptions “behind the words” can be a useful step in building knowledge. This
also facilitates a creative use of language to generate new opportunities for a
future unshackled from obsolete assumptions.
Core Belief 3: Improve performance by identifying and fixing a system’s key
constraints. Systems thinking is invaluable as a means to complement linear
cause-and-effect analysis applied to isolated components of a system, to
address the tendency toward an excessive focus on local efficiencies that can
easily degrade overall system performance, and to powerfully identify and focus
on fixing the key constraints to achieving the system goal.
Core Belief 4: Behavior is control of perception. Human behavior is purposeful, so it
can be productively analyzed as a living control system that acts to maintain
the perceptions of important variables as close as possible to preferred
levels. In short, behavior is control of perception. A control perspective
reveals the underlying weakness in viewing the world primarily as
stimulus-response experiences.
In my opinion, the more each of a society’s members incorporates these
core beliefs into his or her worldview, the greater the resulting dynamism,
economic growth, and sustained job creation.
focusing on how each of us participates in creating what we perceive as
reality. Such a subtle, seemingly philosophical point has, as I’ve discussed,
huge practical implications.
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