Theory of Constraints: Flow, TPS and Boyd's OODA Loop with Steve Holt | Ep 53

What influence did the U.S. Navy Fighter Weapon School (TOPGUN) in the 1970s have on John Boyd’s thinking? This was the question Steve Holt, a Technical Fellow at Boeing, and Ponch were discussing before they decided to record their conversation. 

This episode picks up as Steve and Ponch agree that the TOPGUN-Boyd story captured in Dan Pederson’s book, TOPGUN provides some insights on Boyd's closed to open system journey. Together, Steve and Ponch explore how Boyd’s pioneering E-M Theory altered the landscape of aircraft design, while brushing up against concepts like the Free Energy Principle and agility.

This discussion took an intriguing turn into a critical analysis of the Theory of Constraints, tracing its origins back to Eliyahu Goldratt’s groundbreaking business novel, 'The Goal'. The concept of constraints came under our microscope, shedding light on how these seemingly limiting factors can actually serve to supercharge a system's performance. Steve elucidated how Goldratt’s approach to the Theory of Constraints focuses on understanding what could be going on in the system and how to capitalize on it.

The conversation then shifted towards the often misunderstood subject of inherent simplicity and how it can be harnessed to manage a system's performance. The concept of inherent simplicity, as explained by Steve, is often misinterpreted. In reality, it serves as a powerful tool for managing capacity and constraints in systems.

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Recent podcasts where you’ll also find Mark and Ponch:

Eddy Network Podcast Ep 56 – with Ed Brenegar
The School of War Ep 84 – with Aaron MacLean
Spatial Web AI Podcast – with Denise Holt
OODAcast Ep 113 – with Bob Gourley
No Fallen Heroes – with Whiz Buckley
Salience – with Ian Snape, PhD
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Economic...

Transcript

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 0:57

All right. There are just times when you have to stop what you're doing, having a conversation with somebody, ask them to come on a Riverside FM and record with you. This is one of those moments where our friend, steve Holt, who happens to be a technical fellow at Boeing and, by the way, all of the views that he shares today are his own, potentially, and he'll make that clarification if we need to. But I've known Steve for several years now. We've engaged up in Canada, up at Whistler through Dave Snowden, and, of course, at the Kinevin Oodleoo exploratory that we had in Quantico, virginia, in 2019. So I got to spend a lot of time with Steve, and Steve happens to know a lot about John Boyd and the theory of constraints and quite a bit of other things that I just don't have the depth of knowledge about.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:43

So let me start with how this conversation began. Got an email and said hey, brian, are you familiar with Dan Peterson's book Top Gun? Did you know that back in early 1970s, john Boyd had an engagement with the Navy Fighter Weapon School where there was a disagreement? And I made the comment yes, I'm very familiar with that and that's where the conversation started today, but we don't know where it's going to go. But anyway, welcome, steve. Great to have you here on. No Way Out Been looking forward to having you on as a guest and here you are, and I know it's the last minute thing, isn't it?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 2:19

So this is going to be fun. So, steve, we were talking, prior to coming on the recording, about a few things that happened in the 70s and some watershed moments that we believe happened to John Boyd. Do you want to share some of your insights with the audience?

Steve Holt: 2:36

Well, I was reading the book, the story of Boyd running into the top ground instructors, and in some ways it didn't quite feel right in a way. So it seemed like Boyd gave up the argument a little bit too early, but at the same time, at the time he was making the point, at least in the story, that it was all about the technology, it was all about the airplane, which just seemed totally at odds with the same Boyd that said people fight wars and they use their minds and people process and tools in that order. So it seems like either he was compiling this and put it together and it helped him realize yeah, there's got to be something more to it, or something similar. But it did seem to be what seems like a pivotal moment.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 3:39

And just for some more context there, the Dan Peterson's book, and we've written about this a few times. We talked about this a few times on the podcast. It's really John Boyd coming in with his EM theory. In my view it's a closed system view of how things work and it's very powerful. Many folks think that EM theory has a nice connection to even the free energy principle, a nice connection to agility. There's a lot of possible connections there that we may delve into in this podcast down the road.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 4:14

But the EM theory was so powerful that we ended up with the F-16, f-15, yf-17, which is now the F-18 out of that program and it really influenced quite a bit about how we designed aircraft. But the top gun, the Navy Weft Fighter, weft School Bros did is. They came in and said hey, you're forgetting about one thing, probably the most important thing, and that's the crew or the person in the cockpit. There's an open system, a complex adaptive system that's actually going to fight with this machine as one fighting another potential combatant in an air and some type of dog fight. So that's the conversation.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 4:53

It's kind of a thumbnail sketch of what was actually said down in, I think, if it's, eglin Air Force Base in the early 70s, but this is where we're pulling from right now. Is that engagement with John Boyd? So Steve and I were having that conversation. I agree with Steve that there is a we all go through a learning process and I think at that point Steve John Boyd was fixated on entropy, the second law of thermodynamics applied to closed systems and we know today that living systems, we fend off the second law of thermodynamics entropy, that's how we persist through time.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 5:35

Right, that's how we live is we're always fighting the second law of thermodynamics and when we lose, we're part of the system. Right, and that's called death. Right.

Steve Holt: 5:46

So just back to the if everything's stable, you're dead.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 5:50

Yeah, and this is why it's so important to it's okay to have that closed system view of things and an open system view of things Because, as you know and we all know that we don't we're always going back and forth between different types of systems, and that's what we get from the dynamics of the Kinevan framework. So, steve, I appreciate those insights today and anything else you want to add on that topic before we jump over to theory of constraints.

Steve Holt: 6:18

Maybe not, but I'll come back to it if I think of some more of what we're going on. All right, I did think I would. I might tell you, though, how I first came across Boyd yeah, please do Because it was.

Steve Holt: 6:29

It was a direct result of a theory of constraints. So I was in a workshop from a person that was helping us. His name is Tony Rizzo and he he actually was talking about critical chain project management and how to do it and he brought up Boyd and he expressed Boyd from a standpoint of the, the kind of prototypical OODA loop, and talking about the fact that he saw the point of saying Boyd's approach to, to going faster than your opponent, applies to product development. So if you can get your products to market faster, then you're going to, you're going to win right, and it's. There's a. There's some great examples from the past with the I think it was Yamaha and Honda's motorcycle wars, hewlett Packard did that with digital cameras for a long time where you would say, why would I, why would I buy from these guys, when, when these guys are turning out a brand new model every six months, right, so you, you capture the market by going faster.

Steve Holt: 7:48

Well, this really got me interested in in knowing more about Boyd. So that just started off this whole reading campaign, right I I followed up with, like Bill Lynn's maneuver warfare handbook, frans Ozinga's book, chat Richards, certain to win right, corum's book, obviously, and just on and on and on and it, it just really it really looked to me like. And then I realized that there was a, there was maneuver conflict theory and not just maneuver warfare theory. And then the fact that Boyd, according to chat Richards right, had actually looked at Toyota and said at the time, very early on, that the only example he had ever run into in in business was the Toyota product development system. And this was before any book had been written, as far as I know, on the Toyota product development system.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 8:55

It came out later in a really, really major work by Leica and Morgan, and I have actually, you and I, we've been in the archives and we got the chance to look at that. We've had Charlie Protsman on the show, a single prize winning author, charlie Protsman. And right, I happen to have in front of me some of the notes from the machine that changed the world and I was going to read some of these. These are John Boyd's notes in the book. These comments are misleading. Authors did not read Ono carefully enough, right? That's from page 56. These comments, together with those on the next page, reveal once again authors have failed to come to grips with Ono's concepts and associated action as to what's being done, why it's done and how it works.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 9:37

And he goes on and on. I've got one last one here. It's clear from reading chapter three that the authors did not come to grips with Taiichi Ono and the Toyota production system. Furthermore, there are no mentions of Shingo and his contributions. Why is this so? Because, in reality, they do not understand how to make snowmobiles, which in turn permits one to leapfrog the competition. And leapfrogging is the name of the game if you want to survive and grow in an evolving competitive reality. These are John Boyd's notes inside the book the machine that changed the world. Right, it's pretty amazing.

Steve Holt: 10:14

And because you're right, I've got a chance to go to the archives as well and read this material and it's really fantastic to read what he wrote. And this is an example where he's criticizing some people that are viewed today as some of the real seminal thinkers right, and making the point that they didn't really understand the real concept. And you can look at that with a certain degree of arrogance, of course, but that doesn't necessarily mean he's wrong, right?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 10:45

Correct, yeah, and he's an equal opportunity critic, a player, yeah, critic, yeah. So I mean, there's so many things that we're talking about today that I imagine he would critique you and I were talking about the free energy principle, active inference, bayesian inference, things like that, but theory of constraints, I don't know. Did Boyd have access to theory of constraints, or can you walk us through the history of that a little bit more?

Steve Holt: 11:12

It's sort of hard to say. The real primary work from theory of constraints that comes out the most. The most people learn about is Ellie Goldrath's book the Goal. And he I mean he was a PhD nuclear physics that converted over then into helping to create success in businesses and from almost from day one he focused on flow and the importance of improving flow. So when he wrote the Goal it was interesting. We're used to the concept of a business novel today, but it appears that the Goal was the first ever business novel and he wrote it intentionally as a story because he thought it would be more effective at getting people to pay attention. And so he wrote the book and then he shopped it around to dozens of publishers and they all rejected it, except one, north River Press and he was very pleased with that and has gone back to North River Press on all his subsequent books.

Steve Holt: 12:37

That book is really effective because it's a story of a plant manager who's given 90 days to increase profitability of his plant or it'll be shut down and all the people laid off. And he realizes through some meeting an old college professor of his, that just about everything he learned in MBA school is going to take him in exactly the wrong direction. So he he implements some things that are extremely effective and he saves the day, right? Well, you learn how to do production scheduling along the way reading this book. But it isn't a book to explain this to you, right? You just get it because you come away from reading that book and saying, wow, I wish we could do that.

Steve Holt: 13:30

And there's a bit of an irony here because the the the story is that Goldwright wrote that book as marketing and when you you would get to the end of the book and you'd see the if you want more information, call us up and we'll sell you our software. What was happening is he would run into people and they'd say, hey, I read the book, I did exactly what you said, and they had our profits are up 20%. So people weren't buying the software, they were just using the basic principles in the park. And he had to retrench and he had to step back and say, okay, what am I missing here? And then that's when he kind of converted his whole I don't wanna say business model, because his original partners were not that happy with him, because he basically said we have to stop selling software and actually help teach people how to think, and that became his goal in life. Is teaching people how to think Sounds familiar? Yeah, it does, doesn't?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 14:35

it, yeah. So when I first came across Gold Rat's work, theory of Constraints was through Gene Kim's the Phoenix project. Right, so I didn't get a chance.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 14:47

Yeah, so Gene Kim followed the same approach. We get DevOps, or the kind of DevOps, out of that world same type of thinking. One of the things I'm seeing with Theory of Constraints, though, is and I think you and I talked about this several years ago as well that is, some people take it as a one size fits all approach, right, and then they don't look into what constraints actually mean, and I'll tell you right now like, the feedback pathway inside John Boyd's ooloop is a constraint, all right. This is pretty cool, and so is the new information that's coming in from the outside world, because that gives you context, which is a constraint, right. So we get into governing constraints, we get into enabling constraints. We get all these different things and kind of like biases. When people say there's a cognitive bias out there and it has a negative annotation or connotation with it, it's not a bad thing. Biases are okay-ish, and I think constraints can be viewed as okay-ish.

Steve Holt: 15:42

There's sometimes we need a little yeah, definitely there's a. Once I started looking at the Knevin framework and we talked initially it said it talked about enabling constraints right, and that led me then to try to find more about enabling constraints. So that led to Alicia Guerrero and other people and I realized that and I ended up doing a presentation at a TOC conference in 2019, where I made the point that TOC is filled full of enabling constraints, but we don't call them constraints. We actually call them solutions. And if you go back to the goal, there's a great example in there. There is a machine in the factory that is their constraint, and so the main character, alex, says what can we do to increase the flow of parts for this machine?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 16:43

Yeah.

Steve Holt: 16:44

One of the things he realizes is when lunchtime comes, everybody takes the lunch break.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 16:49

Yep.

Steve Holt: 16:50

So what he said was stop doing that. From now on, I want you guys to shift your lunch schedule so one of you is always at the machine producing all day long, and if this, of course, an improvement at the system constraint, is an improvement for the entire system, if you improve anywhere else, the odds are you are not gonna improve your overall throughput, your flow rate, because, by definition, nobody else is the system constraint. So when Goldrat went in in the book and he described the character saying you guys gotta shift your lunch hour, well, if I'm a worker on that machine, I'm having a constraint. My boss is telling me I don't get to have friends lunch with my friends anymore, right? Yep, yes, I gotta be working, we all gotta do this.

Steve Holt: 17:50

Well, I've had a constraint labeled on me, right, it's like. But what it is is it enables the system to perform at a much higher level. Yes, toc calls it injection, but if you looked at it another way, it's actually an enabling constraint. So we hypothesized that it could very well be that when we talk about TOC, rather than the perception that we wanna remove constraints, the real benefit comes in what constraints we wanna add.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 18:32

Yeah, there's so much on Pac here and we'll have Alicia Gerardo on the podcast, but I have this right in front of me right now her definition from her book. Her book, which is context, changes everything. Constraints are entities, processes, events, relationships, conditions that raise or lower barriers to energy flow, and energy flow could be information, value, whatever. So, and I think that aligns to your little accounting there, your little story that you just shared with us as to what it means. And then you have unintended consequences too, when you, as social creatures, you say, hey, you can't go socialize with your coworkers, that creates something else, but as a leader, you have to have, you're responsible for the consequences of that right.

Steve Holt: 19:21

Yeah, no, you're absolutely right.

Steve Holt: 19:23

And it's why. So, when the goal first came out, it really was about physical constraints. This machine doesn't have the capability of every other machine in the factory, and so it gave the perception early on that that's all it cared about. Well, goldratt began to see what you're talking about and he said no, wait a minute, there are other things that limit us. Sometimes it's policies, sometimes it's mindset, and so we have to actually look at all of those, because if you wanna come up with a solution, you have to deal with each one of those. It's not just enough to deal with one.

Steve Holt: 20:08

Yeah, and so he created this thing called the thinking process, which logical thinking process, which is another way to say how to solve any problem, but it absolutely. You are not done solving a problem until you have figured out how to implement, what the negative ramifications of implementation are, how to avoid those and how to get people to do it. All of that. It's not enough to say, hey, we just need this new scheduling system, go do that Right. That won't do it.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 20:46

So there's more in here the idea of using when I was working at Amazon, you know, at Fortes for a time I was there.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 20:55

It's basically a flow system there, right, and you're just trying to optimize the flow of packages throughout the day and the bottlenecks are and shift handovers and things like that how do you maximize the output or throughput through that system? And if you look at a fulfillment center, it is a perfect example of a I'm gonna use a complicated flow system. But once you put people in it, you inject some complexity and then you add in some outputs from vendors that change the size of their boxes, that jam the system up because the computer says that can't be true, that box size is not. That is pretty amazing. So it is a great example to go see a flow system live and how you deal with different constraints throughout the day because it does change, right. And now you add in robots and you add in some artificial intelligence. It's, and someday, when those fulfillment centers start making money, I would highly recommend by a lot of Amazon you know that day's coming here real soon.

Steve Holt: 21:52

You know, you bring up a really interesting point too, which is there's gonna be this difference in opinion, which is really important. So as a supplier, as a customer, I may wanna get my stuff right away, right, I want it fast. But then I'm gonna complain. If I order something and it's something really small, right, and it comes in a giant box, I'm gonna say, well, that's just wasteful, why isn't it a smaller box? Well, the more you optimize the box size to fit the product size, in a sense, the more variation you're putting into the system, because now you gotta have the capability. It'd be great if you know from a, if you were just going after efficiency, you'd do something like every single box, exactly the same, same size, every single product. It'd be super easy to automate it, but you wouldn't necessarily make your customers happy.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 22:55

Right, right. Which is bizarre, yeah. And what's fascinating about the short period I was at at Amazon is the system would tell you, hey, these are the dimensions of each of your products and would tell you which box you need to be using, but it would leave it up to the human to figure out how everything fits in there, and it's a puzzle, right. So sometimes you're like, oh okay, the computer's smarter than I am, and eventually you'd get it right, or one of the product dimensions was out of size or out of scope, and that would throw everything off right. So it is a great socio-technical system to go and examine how humans operate with technology.

Steve Holt: 23:35

So you said a keyword. I gotta point it out. If people ask me what I do right, what I tell them is I am a socio-technical systems engineer, and again it's back to a lot of things we all know from the School of Hard Knocks. I can have an absolutely perfect product that meets all the requirements, but people aren't gonna use it. It's too difficult, and there's some really good or bad examples from product development Within systems engineering. I believe it's the Stinger missile, the man-powered one. It did a superb job at passing all those tests until they went out and actually tried it in the field with real people, and the success rate just plummeted. And what they came to realize pretty obviously is it had this long, extensive list of steps you had to take in order to fire the missile. It was just too difficult, and so what they did is they redesigned it and made it much, much simpler to use, and that's what then made it successful. But again, the original product met 100% of its requirements that had been set for it.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 25:02

Except you give it to a knucklehead like me and then I'm going to figure out something to screw up on it. Right, that's awesome. We hear those stories all the time. I want to come back to theory constraints and I want to talk about weakest link, and the reason I bring that up is when we talk about complex adaptive systems, you hear people say, hey, you don't want to be the weakest link. Well, it doesn't really work like that in complex adaptive systems. So I want to get your thoughts on this thinking of a weakest link with theory of constraints and how it fits into.

Steve Holt: 25:30

Oh, part of the issue is it's an interesting thing and that kind of gets into some aspects of Kinevin as well At any one point in time, there's really only one true constraint to a system. Now there may be a couple of them that are really similar, which is not good, but what it means also is the constraint can change and in fact you can end up with this concept called wandering bottlenecks, and that's what happens if capacity is. We try to balance capacity on a system. I mean, there's always this efficiency goal that says we should have exactly the right number of people and machines and resources so that everything is working in complete lockstep and so there's just absolutely smooth flow. But the reality is there's always going to be inherent variation in everything you do. So the more capacity is balanced in a system, the greater the odds that the actual system constraint is going to change from resource to resource, possibly multiple times a day, and so what it looks like is it looks like you can't possibly choose a constraint. Everything's a constraint. We just have to do massive amount of firefighter, so it's a really easy thing to track down, and what you really do is just you choose something that you think might be the constraint and say nothing, moves through this step until it's finished. And it's amazing, right?

Steve Holt: 27:30

There was a story early on actually it's a book called the Rudolph Factor and it's about C-17, early days in production, and they were having a lot of trouble getting planes delivered. And there was a senior manager who walked out in the factory one day and he put his hand up on a plane and he said this airplane does not move until it's 100% up to date in this particular assembly station. No travel work, nothing go on past it. It's got to be done at this point and it's not moving. Until then. And there was consternation because everybody was convinced that it was going to. The rails were going to come off, it's going to come off, the rails, they were all going to be fired, et cetera, et cetera. And what happened is in about two weeks things really smoothed out and suddenly they were getting things done and had a schedule and all the chaos that they'd seen before essentially disappeared.

Steve Holt: 28:37

Now this gets into a place where there's an apparent disconnect between Kenevan and TOC, and I say apparent because it doesn't really exist. One of the points Goldrat made is you have to find a point of inherent simplicity, and inherent simplicity allows you to manage. Now, if you've read about Kenevan, then you get the impression that what he's saying is, if I use TOC, I will actually convert a complex system into a simple or a clear system. And that is not at all what he's saying. Not as slightest Can you see a?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 29:30

lot of folks that profess talk actually say that, and I struggle with this because they'll also talk about complexity. I'm like you know that what you're saying over here doesn't match what you're saying over here, but I love this point, steve. This is critical because I know of a few folks up in Pacific Northwest maybe that talk about TOC as the way to go. Right.

Steve Holt: 29:55

And it helps you get there if you really use it. So if you really go back and look at what Goldrat wrote and what he talked about in some of his works, what he follows is very, very much a Kenevan type approach of when you're, when you find yourself in a complex domain, you have to think about what might be happening, come up with some coherent theories, try some things out and then figure out what seems to be working, then zero in on OK, what do I think is happening here and what can we do to capitalize on this? So and then what they would do often is they would document what they came up with through this logical thinking process, analysis approach, which gives people the mistaken impression that Goldrat invented processes by using the analytical thinking process. He didn't. He used that to document why the approach worked. Ok, that's not how it was invented. He was. He was actually doing much more frequently abductive logic and thinking things through and saying what, what could be going on here and what could I test? He?

Steve Holt: 31:21

One of his books he wrote with his daughter, who's a PhD psychologist. She asked him like what, how do you stand to be wrong so much? And he said well, it's wonderful, because when I'm wrong, it means I've discovered one more thing. That's not the answer and it just means I have to keep going.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 31:43

And it was pretty intriguing. So, as you were sharing the story about the Goldrat's theory of constraints, I wrote this down. Hopefully I get this right. So, just as many people oversimplified Boyd's Doodle Loop, it is very possible that people are oversimplifying what Goldrat actually meant Definitely, absolutely.

Steve Holt: 32:06

So that's human nature, though right it is and in fact there's a, there's a nuance in that, with, in in the book, the goal. There's one part of that book that everybody remembers, and it's because the main character, alex, takes his, his son and a Boy Scout troop out on a hike and they're not making a good time. And there's one of the Scouts who's the slowest scout in the whole group and his name is Herbie. And so what they have to do is they have to identify Herbie and then say, ok, now what can we do to enable him to go faster. So they did things like put him at the head of the line, they went through his backpack and took out all the heavy stuff and gave it to other other Scouts. So pretty soon, right, herbie's ability to go faster is successful, and then the whole troop is faster. So there's, it left a mistaken impression that all of TLC is about going on a high Herbie hunt.

Steve Holt: 33:13

And you find today's Herbie and you break that constraint and then you find the next Herbie Gotcha, and there's an element of truth in that. But the real value is goes back to what is it? I want to be the constraint of my system, because once you do that, you now have put your finger on what that controlling mechanism is that gives you that sense of inherent simplicity. I need to manage this one thing, and the rest of them will take care of themselves. To a great extent. It goes within critical chain project management, the TLC approach to project management. The most heavily loaded resource is what sets the stage for the whole thing, and it's called a drum resource because it's like beating the drum right For the cadence. Yes, well, that means, from a project management standpoint, I really only have to level load that one resource and, by definition, everybody else has greater capacity, and so they may get overwhelmed periodically, but they can catch up.

Steve Holt: 34:37

There's a great example, actually, if we go back to the Toyota production system. Many people go on a tour of a Toyota factory like Georgetown, kentucky, and they see what they think they're seeing and not what they're actually seeing, and one of the things I used to work there. I used to go there. So one thing that people think they see when they go there is and again, this number may be a little out of whack, but it was true at the time I think they see an entire assembly line that's operating at a 57-second attack time. That's actually not true. It's only the last stage in final assembly. That's 57 seconds. Upstream steps are less than 57 seconds and what that means is if there's a breakdown in final assembly, everybody else can catch up and they can keep going until they, so they never run out of work, and at the same time, if there's a breakdown further upstream, they can get caught back up again so they don't disrupt that final step. Interesting.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 35:54

So I've been there and I've also been up in Seattle at the 737 line, and I've been 787777 line, and let me tell you this the 737 line looks like Kentucky, right, more so than the 777777 line and you go up I forget the city that the 777777 is built in, but it looks like two different companies. Just from visiting, I'm like, wait a minute, you don't know that they're doing this down there down in southern Seattle? Right, you should go down and visit your other place. So it's amazing that, even in a company and this is my view and it's not Steve Holds for you that it says, though two different companies are operating two different types of assembly lines called Boeing. So I don't know.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 36:45

It's always good to go and see for yourself. What do things actually look like? Right, and I think at the time is 2018, 2019, when I went into the 737 line and where they were going to go with the max production and how I forgot it was like every three days they're going to pop out one. I forgot to take one. Three days, it's really fast.

Steve Holt: 37:04

Yeah, it's really fast, yeah, yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 37:07

And so there's a lot to be learned from, not just theory of constraints and drum buffer rope drum buffer rope, you know toy production system, things like that, but there's also a lot to be learned within an organization that's already executing on something like this. Right, absolutely. And I see this quite often in organizations where they just don't learn or they don't take the time to learn from somebody else with, you know, 20 miles away, or in this case, seattle, I think it's about 70 miles away, it's like 45, but close enough.

Steve Holt: 37:37

Okay, I'm not good with, but you know, at the same time there's a really wonderful thing that Goldwright came up with and he put it in one of his first books, and it's called the PQ game and it's a really simple thought experiment. It's like look, you're a company and you make two products, p and Q. Here's the assembly process. Here's the amount of time it takes. Here's what resources it takes to do it. Here are the parts we buy and what we pay for them. Here's what we pay our employees. Our employees are perfect attendants. Nobody ever gets sick. They're all there every single time.

Steve Holt: 38:21

And the simple question he asks is what's the maximum profit you can get out of this line? It is an unbelievably devious question because the system looks really simple. But if you are the person who does supply chain acquisition, you're going to probably come up with one answer. And if you're the person who's trying to cut down on labor cost, you're going to come up with a different answer. And if you're the person who gets a commission from sales, you're going to come up with a different answer. And none of them are even close to the optimum.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 39:05

Sounds like they all have different constraints.

Steve Holt: 39:08

They're levying their own constraints on the system, right? I mean, this is one of the reasons why Goldratt made a point. In fact, it's what he did before he even wrote his first book. He used to do on these very John Boyd-like lecture series to talk about how cost accounting was enemy number one for production and how full absorption cost accounting just almost always led you to the wrong answer, things that were actively harmful. There's a this sounds funny, but there's a really wonderful book, and it's another business novel by Gerald Solomon called who's Counting, and that's like who Apostrophe S.

Steve Holt: 39:56

And it is literally a book about the application of lean accounting in a manufacturing company, and Goldratt came up with a thing he called throughput accounting, which is practically identical to what later on then became known as lean accounting. And who's Counting is a great book because it really actively shows you how the finance organization and what they can just traditionally measure can actually be actively harmful at your company maximizing its profit. And frankly, it's not. It won't allow you to take advantage of flow is one thing.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 40:46

Can you go on to add some more? This is interesting because I think a lot of organizations suffer from this.

Steve Holt: 40:51

Oh, yeah, so in a way it goes back to Goldratt is If there's one thing he complained about almost beyond anything else, it was the negative impact of local efficiencies and the idea that every machine, every person, had to be maximized 100% of the time because that would allow us to produce the most Well again, when you do that, it means you're a victim of any amount of variation in the system. Can we, Can we stop here for a second?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 41:28

I want to make sure I have something right. I understand local optimization. Used another term there. Are they the same? Yes, can we maximize efficiencies?

Steve Holt: 41:37

Yeah, local efficiencies and local optima are the same thing. Efficiencies here is like your run rate, right? Yep? Well, this machine is only being utilized 80% of the time, as opposed to this machine is being utilized 100% of the time, so that's got to be better. What that does is anybody who's not the system constrained is going to overproduce. And that gets back to Taiji Ono saying that the number one form of risk was overproduction. So Goldback came up with a set of four rules of flow on back, and I'll tell you what these are because it fits in. The first one is if improving flow is a primary objective of operations and management. First step improving flow. Second, the primary objective should translate into a practical mechanism that guides the operation when not to produce.

Steve Holt: 42:47

And again, the reason is because overproduction is so incredibly wasteful. The third one, then, is to abolish local efficiencies. Stop measuring people on the local efficiencies in the organization. And then the final one is where the things get tricky about. Misinterpretation is there has to be a focusing process to balance flow, not balance capacity, balance flow, because you don't want peaks and valleys in what's being produced.

Steve Holt: 43:26

He wrote a. There was a paper he wrote called Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, and he talked about what Henry Ford did to balance flow, and he used literally the space between machines and his factories. So he would tell everybody to produce, but they would reach a point where, if they were overproducing, there'd be so much work in process inventory there wouldn't be room for anymore, so they'd have to stop working. All right, that's an effective way to do it. Well, taiichiyono came along and he said we don't have a lot of money, we can't afford to do that, we have to find another way to do it. So he invented the Kanban system then to be able to say let's limit it to just what's needed and set up a pole system.

Steve Holt: 44:23

But then what was happening is Taiichiyono could get away with that at Toyota, because they really didn't have very many products at the time. They could only afford to have like one or two different types of cars. They couldn't afford a bunch of spare parts, they couldn't afford a bunch of inventory. So once businesses that had hundreds or even thousands of products, they tried to set up a Kanban system. What they end up with is the whole factory is awash in Kanban cars. There needed to be something else. So then what Goldred came up with with drum buffer rope is a way to say you don't have to have a pole system on every single part of the line, it really just needs to be at the constraint. So you want, upstream of the constraint, you want them to work at a pace that the constraint can accept. Downstream of the constraint, you want them to go as fast as they can and get the product out and sent to market. But again, it becomes much simpler to operate, much simpler to get the point across, to be successful.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 46:01

Steve, let me ask you this. You talked about drum earlier and in the story you just shared there it triggered something that goes back to tempo versus speed, right? Potentially so tempo Boyd talks about tempo quite a bit. He talks about speed too, right? It's not about going through the oodaloop faster than your opponent, which everybody says. It's really about controlling the tempo. What I'm hearing from you right now is that tempo that is upstream from the constraint really drives a lot, right? Is that true? Yes, okay.

Steve Holt: 46:34

And that tempo is the the real tempo, and it gets back to why it's called the drum right At one spot. That's what sets the rate for the entire factory, and this gets back to why is it you want to choose where your constraint is. Let's suppose you've got something like a giant milling machine or maybe an autoclave or something that's incredibly expensive. Well, almost by definition, that's going to end up being your constraint, and so what you have to do is you have to use that as the pacing process for everything else, and the reason you're choosing that to be the constraint is there's usually a step function change in cost or implementation risk. If I want to go out and buy another one of these giant milling machines, I have to. Actually, that's going to be a huge amount of money and I have to know what makes sense. So let's get the maximum out of the system I can with what I have now before I got to spend any more money.

Steve Holt: 47:51

One of Goldrat's things that are really common are called the five focusing steps, and this really lays it out. He says you identify what the constraint is and then figure out how you can get the most out of the system given that constraint. How do I make that constraint be as effective as it can be? And then the third one is every other step in the entire process subordinates themselves to what you're doing for the constraint. So if I have a machine, write this my constraint.

Steve Holt: 48:26

Every single step upstream of that, make sure that no defective product ever gets to that machine. Because if a defective part gets to that machine it's wasted for the entire system. And so upstream people are going to say well, that means it's going to take us longer, we're not going to be as effective, our efficiencies are going to go down. We don't care. That's not what we're being rewarded for. We're being rewarded when we actually sell a product and get the cash. It goes back to Tate Jones' book the Toyota Protection System. One of the most astonishingly insightful statements is right up front. It's the first page of the preface and it says, quote from Ono. He said all we're trying to do is take the time between the customer order to part something and when we deliver it and make that as short as possible.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 49:28

Yeah, that's simple.

Steve Holt: 49:30

Maximizing flow Right. And again, what that comes down to also is tempo, because you have to look at your market and say what does the market want? How fast do they want things, and does it make sense for me to actually go after that?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 49:52

All right, Steve, I'm about to make a snowmobile and I think I need your help with this, and I don't know what it really looks like, but I want to kind of kick around this idea. So earlier, before we came on to recording this podcast, we were talking about EM Theory, Energy Maneuble Theory. We're talking about some stuff that's going on in the early 70s, with John Boyd In my mind. Em Theory and we're going to use the Kinevan framework for this EM Theory fits well in the complicated domain. It's a closed system thing. I believe Theory of Constraints fits there quite well and it's not to categorize it right. It's to say, okay, we just want to think about this as a, as a system. Yes, Now we also talked about EM Theory as having potential possible connections to things like organizational agility, maybe the free energy principle, things like that.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 50:39

Well, the same is true with Theory of Constraints. It's just that we're going to take some of these things and apply them to a human system. Right, but those constraints are not going to be those things that you can see. They're going to be the things that you really can't see. They're the dark constraints, if you will. Yes, yes. So entropy in a closed system is. We know what that looks like, and we also know what entropy looks like. By the way, the definite entropy changes from book to book and whoever you read, so we got to be careful there. But to me there's nothing wrong with EM Theory. There's something wrong with EM Theory applied to complex systems. That's what Boyd discovered.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 51:19

And I think what's happening with the Theory of Constraints community is they're trying to take and then I'm generalizing here they're trying to take something that has bounded applicability and trying to use it somewhere else. Now that doesn't mean it's not useful. There are elements of it that you can still use. But we have to stop going in and looking at a system and saying that visible thing right, there is my number one constraint when it could be something that's a reward system. Okay, so that's what I'm trying to. I'm trying to make some connections here. How far off am I in this thinking, or can you build on that?

Steve Holt: 51:52

I think you're very much on track because, and again, it kind of goes back to this inherent simplicity thing again. So you could look at what Boyd is doing with EM Theory and saying this is a thing you can use to provide you with some inherent simplicity when it comes to design or use. Given these two plots for these two aircraft, what does it tell me I should do from a tactical standpoint? Right, and again, what it's doing is it's providing you a focusing mechanism. Now, will it cover every single situation? No, it won't, because there's always going to be new things we discover.

Steve Holt: 52:41

And part of the question is how far into the complex does theory of constraints work? And the project management solution to TOC, in my mind, works farther into complex than some of the other ones. There's a really, really similar question is well, which one is better at this point, agile or critical chain? And the reality is they're almost like I'm not going to. It's not exactly twins, separated birth, but both of them know that there's inherent variation. They use two different ways to do it. So if you're doing sprints, you're actually using a fixed time and a variable amount of work that you accomplish.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 53:37

That's called a constraint.

Steve Holt: 53:39

It is. You're applying constraint right, exactly it. What critical chain does is it says it's the work that's fixed. So I'm going to vary the amount of time. So what you tell in critical chain is you say don't multitask. Start this when everything's ready. Go as fast as possible at a sustainable rate, with no other task. This is your top priority. And pass it on as soon as you're finished, not when the due date says, but when it's finished.

Steve Holt: 54:16

And then the way you take status in critical chain is you go to the people and say get, given that you're working, a full level of effort, how much longer until you're finished? And this, this is so radically different than a waterfall approach which is going to want to ask you things like well, what percent complete are you or are you going to be done by this state? And what you want in when you're doing buffer management like that, is you want to know the reality, you want to know what people think right now, today and it kind of gets back to your point about Bayesian logic again, right, what you're doing as you go forward in a critical chain plan is you're always kind of like going through little oodle loops in a way, saying where are we today? What's the most critical task today? Now, this sounds like firefighting, but it's not, because it's a focusing mechanism.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 55:17

But you're asking this to people that are actually doing the work, and that's critical. The people doing the work. Yeah, they're involved in this and this is that Absolutely Okay, and they're actually closest to the customer.

Steve Holt: 55:28

And so I could go to them today, right, and say when are you going to be finished with this task? And they'll say three days. I might go to them in a couple of days from now and say when are you going to be finished with this job? And they might say four weeks, because we discovered something. The thing we were going to do didn't work, or something didn't come in. It was late. So that then becomes a focusing mechanism for them to get all the help they need. Now you realize the other thing that's important on this is it is hugely beneficial if you have a system of psychological safety. You want people to tell you the truth and you want it to be safe for them to tell you the truth, because that facilitates flow of information.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 56:22

It is, that's exactly it. Yeah, it's a life-flow of an organization?

Steve Holt: 56:26

Yeah, and in a system in which we have multiple metrics that people are being judged by, what it almost certainly always does, is it reinforces the absence of psychological safety? You're correct? Yes, absolutely. If I go in and say, hey, I'm going to be late, people get the perception that what you're saying is I'm incompetent and should be replaced, so no one's going to want to do that. The rare individual will want to do that.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 57:01

Yeah, because there's a constraint that allows people to think that that's what that means. Right Again, it might be a dark constraint, it may be something in the history of the organization, it could be just your previous experience as an adult, right? Right, you don't know.

Steve Holt: 57:14

It's like what do due dates do for you? You could make an argument that well, I can use a due date to be able to back things off from a capacity standpoint and I can get a better understanding of when I should commit. The other part of it is like oh, no, no, no, we have to put due dates on every single task to force people to actually work on that.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 57:42

Well, that actually constraints people to work on them at the last minute, right.

Steve Holt: 57:46

And this gets back to what Goldrat called the student syndrome. And it's really simple. When you say you got the teacher in class and the teacher says, okay, I want you to report your reports due a week from today, and the students all say, oh no, we can't possibly get done a week from today. We've got all this other stuff we got to do, it's like, okay, okay, you get two extra weeks. And the question is, when do the students start working on the report?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 58:14

About two weeks out.

Steve Holt: 58:15

Yeah Right, what they do is they just delay it, so they end up getting massive amount of work effort they have to do at the last minute. And then you run into this risk of, if I reach the due date, if I got an assignment, I got to turn in a report. It's due at nine o'clock tomorrow, right? I get nothing if I turn it in at 9.05. So if I'm not done, I'm going to turn it in the way it is, even though I really I actually had plenty of time to be able to do it. I just frittered it all away.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 58:55

We used to joke around a lot If you plan early, you plan twice, right, yeah, yeah, that's been awesome. Hey, steve, I really appreciate your time today. This was just one of those the universe calling where you just say, hey, pons, I got an idea. I want to talk to you and I'm like, hey, let's record this, because we wanted to have some insights on theory of constraints on the show and, plus your background and understanding of John Boyd's Oololoop and, clearly, the Kinect and Framework, I do have a few more questions for you. So, boeing, you talked about the C-17, go back to the B-17, go back to World War II. We talked about human-centered design, human factors and things like that. We have this knowledge from aviation Our crew coming back from missions and they're tired, they're stressed out, high anxiety, landing in aircraft and combat conditions and then collapsing the aircraft as they land because they reach over and they grab us a lever that isn't marked and it collapses the aircraft because it brings it flaps or whatever Easy solution.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 59:57

make that, put it something that looks like a wheel on the landing gear and something that looks like a flap on the flap. So we get a lot of the. This is amazing. A lot of people don't understand where human factors, human-centered design really comes from right, and I believe it's really that experience in World War II, b-17s, boeing aircraft, things like that. So basically I'm saying, hey, boeing made bad designs, right? No, I'm kidding, I'm not saying that, but we learned a lot from Boeing over the years and it's just amazing what we can continue to learn from Boeing.

Steve Holt: 1:00:27

Well, and not to mention the whole crew resource management with respect to, I mean, this is the thing we. I never heard of that man. What is that? Crew resource management?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:00:35

Yeah right, I know what it is. Yeah, yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:00:37

So it's funny. I don't know if you know this. When I was living up in Seattle, dr Dan Lowe, who's been on the show he went up to Boeing and sat in a simulator and learned CRM in his time in a helicopter in Europe what he called a HEMS H-E-M-S helicopter for medical services. He flew next to a SAS special operator pilot from the British military. Then he came over to Seattle, went into a simulator up at Boeing where they taught him CRM again and he's like we can apply this right now, right? Yes, so to me it's funny is that the team science is crew resource management. A crew is a ritualized form of a team. Teaming is a crew, right. So I find this very difficult to believe that people in the industry aviation will ignore teaming lessons from their very industry, like how do we work better as a team while you go do scrum? I don't think you're right.

Steve Holt: 1:01:45

I think you need to do something else, why don't we?

Steve Holt: 1:01:47

look at what we already know, right? Yes, just look inside. I mean, there's a very similar story, and it's partly in Dr Atul Gawande's book the Checklist Manifesto right, where he talks about flying out to Seattle and visiting the people in Boeing that write aviation checklists. They give him some advice, which is just incredibly important. If you think about it, it fits in with what we're talking about, is it provides you a focusing mechanism. So if you go to a Cessna 150 or 172, or, for that matter, probably an F-14 checklist for how to do an engine restart in flight, it is not a gigantic list. There you go. It is not a gigantic list of steps. It's the most important things that people are going to be more staffed to follow. They're optimists.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:02:45

And one of the important things about a checklist is challenge and respond right. It's not something you just look at and check, check, check, check. Are you actually doing this? I'm going through the motions and I'm having somebody not QA me, but back me up. We call it mutual support, right? So this is the power of it.

Steve Holt: 1:03:03

There's a famous story actually Famous isn't quite the right word, but you can find it online. Because so many things about accidents or public domain because of the FAA. There was a Air Florida plane that crashed in the summer, in the wintertime in Washington DC into a 14th Street bridge across the Potomac. And when you listen to the cockpit voice recorder of the pilot and co-pilot they're going down through the checklist and they get to the item on the checklist that says anti-ice and the copilot or the pilot says off. Because these guys were used to flying planes in Florida, they were flying out into the Caribbean. They didn't turn on anti-ice in most of their flights, so they were habituated to always have the anti-ice off. So here we have it's part of their orientation.

Steve Holt: 1:04:04

It's snowing right and that they just fell into a pattern. So, even though they had the checklist and even though they went through it and even though it was challenging response, neither one of them caught that that was actually wrong.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:04:19

I can see that, yeah. Yeah, I mean, we've had aircraft land on each other, on carriers, right, even though we have redundant systems. But it still happens and it's there's a, there's a human in the system, right. We're gonna make mistakes and we're trying. You know, something else we've learned from CRM is threat and their management. How you trap Errors. You know you trap it because there's leave you. They come from you and then threats come from the external environment. So think about it as a noodle loop inside your. I Don't want to jump too far into the little loop, but it's within the internal system of the little loop. That's where we create errors and then, from the outside, is where we get threats, and your job is to Minimize the threats and minimize errors, right?

Steve Holt: 1:05:04

There's a Amy Edmondson who's famous for psychological safety research, just came out it with a new book called right way to be wrong, mm-hmm, and she really talks a lot about this and and and why it's so important and and how there are basic errors and those are the ones that are avoidable and those are the ones we really can't find ways to avoid. There's other ones that we're doing for learning. If you're gonna be doing a flight test of some new piece of equipment, you don't know what you're gonna find. That's why you're doing the flight test.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:05:40

Right Sounds like the sounds, like the Kinev and framework very much like that, right, yeah.

Steve Holt: 1:05:44

But then there's also these ones where she says look, no matter what we do, something's gonna happen. It's unpredictable, it's complex. So in that environment People have to be able to speak up as soon as they spot something.

Steve Holt: 1:05:59

We need resilience, we need to be able to psychological safety for people to say something's not right here and we can actually go in and look at it and not just what we typically do, which is what was all too frequent with human systems is people say what does seem right, but you know this is the standard approach, so maybe it's me that's wrong, mm-hmm.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:06:29

You know we had the opportunity to I've had the opportunity a couple times to sit down with Amy Edmondson Dr Edmondson from Harvard to talk about psych safety, once the Navy and then once working with John and Nigel on the flow system. One of the questions I was able to ask her this you're gonna love this, because this goes back to crew resource management is the surgical teams that she was observing happen. Some of them happen to be trained in, not necessarily crew resource management, but by aviators. They can't, you know, came from the cockpit and train them. So when you go, when you learn about this, you, you, you learn teaming skills and psych safety happens to be part of it. It's, you can get, it's. I guess it's an emergent property of how you act. Right. If, instead of something you just do you, you have to create it, it's a condition that's created.

Steve Holt: 1:07:11

Why you're really reinforcing, frankly, why team science is such a critically important part of what you put into the flow system too.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:07:19

Yeah, yeah, and there's a reason we cite, you know, dr Solace. There's a reason. He's been on the show, yep, when I learned about his work not only in Tad miss tackle decision making under stress but also crew, crew, crew, resource management and some work that he did with Gary Klein and I think you and I yeah, you and I met very client up in Canada.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:07:42

It's amazing how this network starts to form. Or you get start to see it, and then you start adding dr David Woods in there, then you get a connection to John Schmidt, and then you get a connection to John Boyd and maneuver warfare. You're like, oh my gosh, this is insane.

Steve Holt: 1:07:54

So we're lucky? No, I agree. And what is telling us is is you know, everything is connected, it's all network and there's gonna be some universal principles out there.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:08:09

Yeah, yeah. And we go back to dr David Woods resilience engineering. You get into Gene Kim's work with dev off. So we just talked about gold rats work. You know, I don't know how to make this any easier for folks. I'm like it's all the same. Yeah, that's why we created the flow system. They're like this isn't hard to figure out. You know, it's not saying we're right, it's just saying what we understand right now. This is how you know we're seeing, though, how things actually work, but it's not gonna be like that five years from now, because you know what's doctrine on day one is dogma, you know, it's whatever.

Steve Holt: 1:08:42

Yeah, so good stuff.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:08:43

Hey, anything you any any way our listeners can get in contact with you? Is it just linked in or you have any way they can.

Steve Holt: 1:08:50

I'm definitely a link, then. I'm still on Twitter and you can actually Probably find a number of the presentations I've done for the theory of constraints international certification organization. Some of them are behind paywalls, um, okay, but not all of them are, so it's just to see. I coorg, I believe, yeah, and, and so you can find a one of the. The videos that's on there every once in a while is the first time I introduced the theory of constraints community to the Kinevon framework, and I went into that presentation with a great deal of Concern and anxiety, because it was gonna come across to some of the people in the audience that I was saying that gold rat either didn't know what he was talking about or that he was wrong, because this is what he was talking about inherent simplicity, and what I had to make the point was is that it wasn't that he was wrong, it's that many people misunderstood what he was actually saying, right, and so they asked me if I wanted to do this as a this is my 15 seconds of fame, by the way yeah, that's me. If I wanted to do this as the, as a Presentation to the whole conference, I said sure.

Steve Holt: 1:10:23

What I hadn't realized is that gold rat would be in the room. Oh and he, he is very much like boy Early on where he. He did not suffer fools gladly. He mellowed a bit in later years, but he was more than willing to challenge you in the middle of a presentation, and so he sat there and said nothing, and I had a few minutes left at the end, as I said, are there any questions? And he stood up and I'm thinking, oh Boy, this is gonna be interesting. He walked up to the front of the stage. He's walked up to the front, came up on stage, gave me a hug, kiss me on both cheeks, turned around and sat down. Great, he made. He made a comment later on in the that he was not in the habit of Kissing men with with beards, so but he it essentially actually paved the way then For for conneven framework to be accepted within the TOC community.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:11:37

Yeah, this is critically important, that we continue the network that we have to learn from each other. There's no, there's no one-size-fits-all approach, right, exactly, and this is, I think, why you know a lot of reasons we have the no way out podcast is, you know, boy Gave us a pathway. He didn't really write anything down, he gave us things that changed and he modified over time. That allows us to go back and look and go hey, go look at Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Go look at Cognitive science, neuroscience, go look at these things that biology, dna, which leads us to genetics and epigenetics today. So it just allows us to go look and find out what we don't know. Right, because we and the more we learn, the more we Identify that there's more things we don't know. Yeah, absolutely so, steve. Hey, I appreciate your time today. This has been awesome, just a ad hoc opportunity to have a conversation with you, and we'll definitely do this again in the future, definitely fun.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:12:35

All right.