THEORY OF CONSTRAINTS

The man who moved us into the Effect-Cause-Effect stage wasLouis Pasteur. He said: Let's assume that those tiny things thatLeeuwenhoek found under his microscope more than a hundredyears before, those things we call germs, are the cause of diseases—andbingo microbiology sprang to life. Bingo, of course,means many years of hard work for each disease. By having acause-and-effect we could now create immunizations for a verybroad spectrum of diseases. Yes, not just find immunizations, butactually create immunizations, even for those diseases where suchimmunization is not created spontaneously in nature.But the mostimportant stage—theone that is by farmore powerfulbecause it enables usto create things innature—is the stageof effect-cause-effect.We can go over each subject thatis regarded as a science, whether itis chemistry, genetics orspectroscopy, and the pattern is thesame. The first step was alwaysclassification. There are often somepractical applications from thisstage but the major contribution isusually to create the basicterminology of the subject. Thesecond step— correlation—isusually much more rewarding. Itsupplies us with procedures that arepowerful enough to make some practical predictions about thefuture. Mendeleev's table and Mendel's genetic rules areexamples of this important stage. But the most important stage—the one that is by far more powerful because it enables us tocreate things in nature—is the stage of effect-cause-effect. Only atthis stage is there a widely accepted recognition that the subjectis actually a science. Only then does the question WHY bring intothe picture the demand for a logical explanation. Today there arequite a few mature sciences that have been in the third stage ofeffect-cause-effect for many years. The debate of what is ascience is basically behind us. There is a consensus amongscientists that science is not the search for truths or the search forthe secrets of nature. We are much more pragmatic than that.The widely accepted approach is to define science as the searchfor a minimum number of assumptions that will enable us toexplain, by direct logical deduction, the maximum number ofnatural phenomena. These assumptions—like the gravitational27