“What we are embarking on is a profoundly human endeavor, with all the potential and limitations that implies. On the one hand, we all desire to do extraordinary things, to aim high. On the other hand, we all have our fears, we need to be safe. This creates a kind of creative tension. And organizations, that are made up of people, experience that same tension. We must never ignore that. So today, we’re going to really look at those two fundamental needs that our organization has. We’re going to use a very powerful tool, called a Core Conflict Cloud.”
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In previous chapters, we have seen examples of ‘conflict clouds’. In this chapter, Maidenhead Metals engages in building its Core Conflict Cloud.
A core conflict, for individuals as well as for organizations, will be between something that we strongly desire (and we do not seem to be able to access) and a highly undesirable situation that is the result of how our fears force us to cope with the need for control. This kind of conflict is called “core conflict cloud”. It is a powerful Thinking Process Tool from the Theory of Constraints.
The exercise of building a Core Conflict Cloud for an organization is invaluable and the process can be exhilarating. Over the last 15 years, Intelligent Management has worked with hundreds of top and middle managers to build custom made implementations of the Decalogue and the starting point has always been the writing of the core conflict. A group of managers sits for two-three days in a room starting with a “bitching and moaning” session where all their Undesirable Effects (UDEs )are verbalized. This first phase is a very “feel good” one, everybody agrees that the company is plagued by these effects. These effects are and feel “real” and everybody would like to get rid of them.
Summarizing all the UDEs in one single statement is normally a little cumbersome but it is generally done in few hours. This is the starting point for the procedure, and the end result is normally welcomed as a breakthrough. What happened?
The Conflict Cloud helps to sharpen our intuition. The group of managers in just a few days has moved from an often disparate set of non-verbalized hunches to a clear cut picture of the forces that keep them from achieving their goal. Moreover, a precise description of the needs that craft the psyche of the organization goes a long way in helping to understand the “why” we are trapped in this conflict, the reason for it. We can safely say that no top management strategic retreat session delivers a tangible and operational output like this one. Now that the intuition is strong we can make it stronger.
The conventional way of building a core conflict cloud is to start from the elements of our reality that we perceive as undesirable; historically they are named Undesirable Effects (UDEs). If we go down this route, then the procedure is the following:
1. we collect all the Undesirable Effects (UDEs);
2. we find a verbalization that summarizes them all, we call it D. (We may want to
do this in steps: a) we stratify the UDEs in homogeneous categories; b) we summarize each category with one statement; c) we consolidate these statements into one);
3. we find a verbalization that summarizes all the Desirable Effects (DEs), we would like to experience, we call it D’;
4. we state the need for “control” that forces us to accept, to cope with D; we call it B;
5. we state the need for “vision” that prompts us to say that D’ is the reality we would like to live in; we call it C;
6. we verbalize the most basic goal whose achievement must pass through the simultaneous satisfaction of B and C; we call it A. In other words, B and C must be simultaneously satisfied in order to achieve A.
Let’s look at the Core Conflict of Maidenhead metals.
Let me premise by saying this: there are TOC instructors who will challenge the way this example is written as not being technically correct. While it is true that there are ‘rules’ for writing Conflict Clouds and it is important to be precise, it is also true that this example reflects a very complex real-life situation involving many people form different cultures. It took several sessions that were emotionally complicated to verbalize the cloud. The end result required emotional intelligence to craft it in a way that was acceptable to all involved. Insisting, instead, on mechanical precision to follow ‘rules’ would not have produced the result of a cloud that people were comfortable with and that was fit for the purpose of moving ahead to identify a breakthrough solution and achieve the desired transformation.
They started by listing their Undesirable Effects. As there were many of them, they summarized them into general categories. Then they crunched them down into one, mega Undesirable Effect:
Starting from their Undesirable Effect, the were then able to build the rest of the cloud, verbalizing the needs in the green boxes and a realistic goal, given the needs, in the yellow box. The blue boxes contain all the assumptions, or mental models.
They will be able to solve the conflict and generate a breakthrough solution as a result of listing all the assumptions between the positions D and D’ (pink boxes). These assumptions represent limiting beliefs. The solution is found by challenging and invalidating the limiting beliefs. The solutions are called Injections.
What transforms a core conflict into a full-blown picture of our current reality is a disciplined, orderly elucidation of all the mental models that give birth to the conflict. These mental models are deeply rooted images that we have of ourselves and the world around us. These mental models, which we may also call “assumptions”, are the cognitive lenses through which we perceive reality.
Assumptions are, like any other mental construction, the result of external (the environment, education, experiences, values, etc.) and internal (the chemistry and physics of our mind) factors. The difference between an assumption and a statement of reality is only the realm of validity, determined often by cultural circumstances. (If you want a practical example of this last statement, take a sentence like “in a democracy every citizen is entitled to decent, affordable and reliable healthcare” and ask for a comment from a statistically representative sample of individuals in the US, Canada, and Europe).
Assumptions are the logical connectors between goal, needs and wants; they help us see the logic that shapes the conflict. A conflict with its set of clearly verbalized assumptions portrays the current reality precisely in the way we experience it and is the strongest possible support we can provide to our intuition.
