Eli Goldratt, Albert Einstein, and Mohit Saini

Introduction

Mohit Saini recently produced a new and succinct summary of the four principles that are fundamental to Theory of Constraints, he verbalised these as: inherent simplicity, inherent harmony, inherent goodness of people, and inherent potential. I found these new expressions especially useful. However, it is also clear to me from numerous instances in the past, that there are many people who still do not understand that these principles port straight from science. So there is a story to tell there. Moreover, not too many people understand that we need to think at a different level in order to be able to do this, so there is a story there too. However, within this new verbalisation the second one, inherent harmony, was causing problems for me. I wanted to say there is "small" harmony and there is "big" harmony. In searching for a distinction I found that "small" harmony might also be expressed as inherent congruence. And that leaves big harmony for last, and there is a story in that as well. So, let's start.

Albert Einstein

In an article in Nature, entitled Did Einstein really say that? we find from Alice Calaprice, editor of The Ultimate Quotable Einstein (2011), that "... Einstein might be the most quoted scientist in history. The website Wikiquote has many more entries for him than for Aristotle, Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin or Stephen Hawking, and even than Einstein’s opinionated contemporaries Winston Churchill and George Bernard Shaw."

I only discovered the above facts after going on a Herbie hunt for one of my favourite Einstein quotes, it goes like this:

"We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking we used when we created them"

The reason I like this, is that it speaks to the idea that all scientists understand, that there are different levels of understanding, that things are emergent, and that there is inherent potential that exists around us. Inherent potential is in fact the ultimate destination of this little piece. As the Nature articles implies, you ultimately come up hard against where, and when, and if indeed, Einstein actually said that. But for the sake of argument, let's us assume that Einstein did say that. (See even I can pretend to be an applied mathematician or an engineer, and even though a scientist would never assume anything, it sometimes nice to pretend that you can.)

That assumption is important because of the next point. When I have searched on that quote in the past I have frequently come upon something quite similar but different. Have a look at this:

"We can not solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them"

I'll give you a couple of moments to pick the difference.

One

Two

Three

Time's up!

The first quote included the words "level of " as in "different level of thinking" whereas the second is just "different thinking." Now, if Einstein did indeed say that, then he would not have been so sloppy to have dropped the "level of " if that is what he was addressing. And we are lead to believe that, in fact, he was addressing issues of world peace in a nuclear age. So, although I have always refrained from using that quote, it does find currency within science as an appeal to authority when discussing logical levels.

I also think that we can safely assume that some people who see this quote fail to understand the subtlety within it. Different levels of thinking is not the same as different thinking. Running around having a brain-storm (which is apparently what designers and advertisers do) is not going to help.

So let's now bring Eli Goldratt into the picture.

Eli Goldratt

In a number of places, but most easily accessible in The Choice, Goldratt lays out four fundamental principles that underline Theory of Constraints. Three of which are from science and one of which is from psychology or therapy. The latter is required in order to address the "social" in the socio-technical systems or the "psycho" in the psycho-social systems that we find in the form of our modern organizations. Here are the four fundamental principles.

• Every situation is simple.
• Every conflict can be removed.
• People are good.
• Every situation can be substantially improved.

Let's examine this in more depth, there is a rich context.

The first principle: every situation is simple, is simply a restatement of something that can be traced back to Aristotle (384-322 BC) and earlier:

We may assume the superiority ceteris paribus [other things being equal] of the demonstration which derives from fewer postulates or hypotheses.

Ptolemy (c. AD 90-168) later stated:

We consider it a good principle to explain the phenomena by the simplest hypothesis possible.

The extent to which this is socialised and accepted within modern science is illustrated rather pointedly by Gregory Bateson:

... if you are a good scientist, you will be influenced by the presupposition called Occam’s razor, or the rule of parsimony: that is a preference for the simplest assumptions that will fit the facts.

These are all statements of inherent simplicity. Now there is a bit of a paradox here. This draws us back to the statement of Einstein. Inherent simplicity comes from a different level of thinking, a higher level of thinking, rather than just thinking more, or thinking harder, at the same level. There is good reason for this. You see, the simpler that we can make something, the greater the number of cases for which it must be held to be true. Or to put it another way, the simpler the solution the greater its utility. This is because the simpler that we make a solution the greater the risk that we might find an exception to that rule, and that is its real strength. Now there are two caveats to be had.

Firstly, there is a popular belief afoot about the methodology of science which now extends, so it seems, into the philosophy of science as well, that we should make a hypothesis and then seek to challenge or refute it. This is nonsense. We may risk refutation (usually by others), that is what inherent simplicity is all about. That is what the law of parsimony is all about. But we do not seek it (ourselves).  

Secondly, even if this belief in refutation wasn’t nonsense, it is exceedingly hard to do. Epistemologists, people who delve into how we think about the world, such as Gregory Bateson or Russell Ackoff, recognise the cliché about the “beautiful theory, killed by a nasty, ugly little fact.” They know that this just doesn’t stand up to inspection.

 In principle, a law or theory can be disconfirmed by just one contradictory fact. But in practice the fact which appears to contradict the law or theory is itself always subject to doubt. Consequently, there have been many historical instances where facts which appear to contradict laws or theories have been rejected in order to maintain a law or theory in which the scientist had more confidence than he did in the fact.

So to sum up that fist line of Eli Goldratt's four principles, we assume inherent simplicity because it forces us to think at a higher level, and in doing so it makes us more prone to finding exceptions, and in the absence of those exceptions we gain even more confidence in our findings.

So what then of the second of our principles: every conflict can be removed. Well this just takes us back to Aristotle once more.

The most certain of all basic principles is that contradictory propositions are not true simultaneously.

And do you know what? It is simply more of the same thing, going back again to the statement of Einstein, this requires, thinking at a different level. Many people in Theory of Constraints make the mistake that we are searching for an erroneous assumption. That is the equivalent to different thinking rather than a different level of thinking; that is the same as the mis-quote of Einstein's. You have to think at a different level, a more systemic or holistic level, in order to discover, in a revisionist form, the so-called erroneous assumptions at the lower level. There is no other way. Its always post-hoc, it is always after the fact if you like. Let's do that another way; you will never find an erroneous assumption thinking at the same level.

If I had a dollar for every time someone told me of an anthropomorphic "conflict" rather than of two contradictory propositions that appear to be true simultaneously, I'd be off to the pub, not to drink beer, but to BUY the pub. Again that whole Einstein mis-quote shows how little we appreciate what science says. Think about it for one moment, even if it is anthropomorphic, every cloud we draw, whether they are systemic, or chronic, or simply a dilemma, is a verbalisation of a contradiction that can't be true. If the contradiction could be true there would be no conflict.

How do we resolve these apparent contradictions that we write down with such authority? Well, we know the answer already, inherent simplicity. That's why inherent simplicity comes first in our list, or left-most in Eli's English left-to-right depiction. How do we find inherent simplicity? One more time: by thinking at a different level - just like Einstein said!

What of the third principle: people are good? My ground truth for this is a small collection of aphorisms from a health and safety journal. They include:

People make the best choice they can at the time.

 All behaviour has a positive intention.

 People respond to their map of reality and not to reality itself.

Milton Erickson, a fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association, finds his way into this story through Gregory Bateson. Erickson "... respected the client's unconscious mind. He assumed there was a positive intention behind even the most bizarre behavior, and that individuals make the best choices available to them at the time." And, if that sounds familiar, there is a not unrelated strand that also comes to us again via Bateson, this time from Korzybski. Korzybski considered that people respond to their map of reality and not to reality itself. We can go much deeper than that, but lets not. Suffice to say, whether it is cybernetics or psychology, there is a commonality here.

We also need to make a distinction between cause and effect, between intent and impact. We have to make a distinction between our positive intent, our goodness, and the sometimes negative impact that arises out of our positive intent, our badness if you like. Even more so, if that impact is separated in time, or space, or logical level. Many times when we describe someone else as bad, it is not their intent that is the problem, it is the impact arising out of that intent that is the problem. It is not the cause that is the issue, it is the effect.

Let's look at the forth principle: every situation can be substantially improved. Well that just comes back to the first and second principles. When we seek simple solutions, when we seek to avoid contradictory propositions, when we think at a different level of thinking, then there will be emergent outcomes that we could not even imagine. Who could have possibly have guessed that inventing the blue LED would end up with Twitter on your phone! Be careful of what you wish for!

At a more prosaic level, here is Michael Polanyi expressing exactly this same principle for chemistry (and a subtle dig at physicists):

Just link up two or three of the atoms of physics, and their behavior becomes so complex as to be beyond the range of exactitude.

What he was saying is not that we can't know this behaviour, especially after the fact, but that rather we certainly can't know this behaviour before the fact. Polanyi as a philosopher of science championed the notion of emergence. Bateson expressed such a similar notion in a slight different way too:

Not only can we not predict into the next instant of the future, but, more profoundly, we cannot predict into the next dimension of the microscopic, the astronomically distant, or the geologically ancient.

I hope that you might see, especially in this last excerpt, that thinking at a different level, even if that level is smaller, further, or older, is paramount to what we are seeking to do. Our different level is more usually one of logic or process or organisational hierarchy.

So now let's see what Mohit Saini did with these four principles.

Mohit Saini

Mohit Saini re-verbalised the four fundamental principles, in my mind, into something more succinct and unified than before. This is what he wrote:

• Inherent simplicity.
• Inherent harmony.
• Inherent goodness of people.
• Inherent potential.

Now I was over-the-moon with this for several days. As you can see from the previous section I have more than a passing interest in the underpinnings of this. Over-the-moon that was until I was on my way back to earth. At about that point the word harmony popped up like a parachute and began to slow me down. I thought this over for a couple of days and then I came up with this.

• Inherent simplicity.
• Inherent harmony = small harmony.
• Inherent goodness of people.
• Inherent potential.

Why do that? Well to me harmony also means big harmony. Big harmony is abductive, its like Copernicus seeing the sun as God's lantern in the rightful centre of the universe, with the planets orbiting around inside the celestial sphere. Or stepping it out, us seeing our own solar system as just one star in a vast sea of stars orbiting in our galaxy. And so on, up and down the scale. Here is Gregory Bateson on abduction:

"Metaphor, dream, parable, allegory, the whole of art, the whole of science, the whole of religion, the whole of poetry, totemism ..., the organization of facts in comparative anatomy ? all these are instances or aggregates of instances of abduction, within the human mental sphere.

But obviously, the possibility of abduction extends to the very roots also of physical science, Newton's analysis of the solar system and the periodic table of the elements being historic examples."

This is BIG harmony.

So, now, what I am going to do about small harmony? Well I am going to change its name so that harmony stays intact for the really big stuff, the patterns, and the pattern's of patterns that connect and interconnect.

Bateson asked: "What pattern connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose and all four of them to me? And me to you? And all the six of us to the amoeba in one direction and to the back?ward schizophrenic in another?" Maybe you can answer that now.

Inherent Congruence

I couldn't go looking for a synonym of non-contradiction, but I could go looking for an antonym of contradiction. And after rummaging around for a while I found one that to my mind is perfect: congruence. If you then fire up the dictionary it says of congruence: "in agreement or harmony." Perfect. Congruence is harmony, small harmony in our case. For me it also has some geometric implications that work very well with the way I graphically solve the intent-impact matrix.

So I slotted congruence into Mohit Saini's verbalisation.

• Inherent simplicity.
• Inherent congruence.
• Inherent goodness of people.
• Inherent potential.

Now I have the issue of small harmony solved. And that leaves BIG harmony intact.

Goldratt got so close to expressing similar things as abduction, the harmony, the patterns that we see across scales and also across different aspects of human endeavour:

"You see, it's amazing how frequently things that seem to be unrelated are connected to form a bigger picture. Similarities and symmetries emerge out of nowhere with such frequency that scientists start to expect and use it. Harmony is everywhere."

Out of our inherent simplicity, out of our inherent congruence, comes inherent potential. They all rely on thinking at a different level, a higher level, a bigger level. Ah, you see, that's why I think this is BIG harmony.