THEORY OF CONSTRAINTS

4. How to Invent Simple Solutions:Evaporating Cloudsas long as we thinkthat we already know,we don't bother to rethinkthe situation.Once the core problem is pinpointedthen the challenge ofusing the Socratic approach iseven bigger. Now the audiencehas to be induced to derivesimple, practical solutions. Themajor obstacle to accomplishingsuch a task is the fact that people usually already have in theirminds, the "accepted" solutions. Remember, we are dealingwith core problems and typically core problems. They haveusually been in existence within our environment for manymonths or even years—they do not just pop up. This provides uswith the best indication that the perceived solutions are insufficient,otherwise the core problem would have already beensolved. It is clear that the nature of human beings is such, that aslong as we think that we already know, we don't bother to rethinkthe situation. Thus whenever we want to induce people toinvent, we must first convince them that the "accepted" solutionsare false, otherwise they will not think, they will just quoteIt's not unusual to find that the accepted solutions, which dcnot work, are solutions of compromise. Our observation is thatwhenever a core problem is confronted, it turns out that thecore problem was already intuitively very well known (ever37