I'd thought I'd post a few reflective thoughts on last week's TOCICO conference held in Barcelona and the development of the TOCICO as an organization.

The conference format is 4 days. The first two days are actually a pre-conference tutorial from Eli Goldratt by invitation only. In practice, this means that about 90% of the attendees attend all 4 days. The audience on the first two days are considered knowledgeable about TOC and many have Jonah qualifications or are certified by the TOCICO. This year Eli's presentation on Viable Vision was more developed and more articulate though the material hadn't developed terribly much. The essence of Viable Vision is to bring an industrial scale to TOC adoption and by necessity the consulting and knowledge transfer to deliver massive adoption. Eli has opted to publish templates (we'd call them patterns) for Viable Visions. There are currently 8 of them and they have names like Rapid Replenishment, VMI, Pay Per Click, Distribution and so forth. These patterns are very powerful. They bring together go-to-market offers from the constraints marketing work first presented in It's Not Luck and match them to underlying operational improvements from TOC implementations like Drum-Buffer-Rope or Critical Chain. A pattern is selected based on a set of sufficient conditions and the assumptions which underpin them. These patterns therefore select a business model, go-to-market strategy, sales offer and operational plan together for a specific business in a defined market. These enable a business to turn its current gross revenue number into its net profit number within 4 years. Typically, the operational plan takes 9 to 12 months to implement, then the new offer is taken to market. It can take up to 12 months to gain traction in the market, leaving 2 years to make sufficient money to realize the promise of the viable vision. The interesting thing is that with many of the schemes, there is huge buffer to spare. Taking a $50M revenue company with $10M in profits up to $50M in profits over 4 years is theoretically very easy given the right circumstances. The current constraint appears to be the ability of existing sales teams to sell these unrefusable offers (UROs as they are known in TOC-speak). Hence, Goldratt Consulting are currently hiring sales force specialists who teach the clients' sales teams how to sell the offers.

All well and good and very interesting from an intellectual point of view, but really these first two days primarily benefit consultants trying to sell and implement Viable Visions throughout the world. For the rest of us it was of limited usefulness. However, a session with Eli is not without its nuggets of wisdom and I took two away. The first is that people find it hard to follow patterns. In the worked example that he had us all try on the 2nd morning, most of the audience failed to follow the sufficient conditions and assumptions for the templates and came to the wrong answer - advising their clients to implement the wrong offer, one which would lead to the wrong strategic reaction from their competitors. Patterns are hard to follow and apply properly. We've known this for 10 years in the software business.

The second nugget is more useful. "Subordination happens first!" In the 5 focusing steps, the third step is to subordinate the rest of the system to the decision made in step 2 to fully exploit the capacity constrained resource. I had observed in my work with the XIT Sustained Engineering group (the subject of my paper for the conference), that the subordination actions always had to happen first before the constraint could be fully exploited. However, this is counter-intuitive given the order of the steps. As Eli reminded the audience, step 2 is "Decide what (and how) to exploit." This then leads to a set of subordination decisions which make exploitation possible. Subordination always happens first.

The 3rd and 4th days are the actual conference proper. These 2 days consist of a 2 hour keynote speech from, guess who? Yep, Eli again! Then a series of presentations of 45 minutes each separated into two tracks. There were also front and back end keynote speeches presenting sizable case studies from industry including a job shop making pumps for the oil industry, a major manufacturer of heavy industrial equipment including earth movers and oil drilling rigs, and a logging and wood products company. Throughout the event there were frequent coffee breaks for networking and catching up on email. For the non-consultants these latter two days were much more interesting. Here we could see the diversity of the TOC community and have a collection of our fellow practitioners present their work extending the state-of-the-art or validating the current knowledge with case studies.

One of the last orders of business was the TOCICO Annual General Meeting of members. This included the election of new board members. The voting had taken place the day before.

Overall, I like the trend that I see in the TOCICO. It is gradually losing its Eli Goldratt focus. In fact, there are only 3 Goldratt Consulting people on the 10 person board following the latest round of elections. Many of the new board members are academics and this reflects the growing maturity of the body of knowledge and its adoption in academic curricula. It was Eli's intention that the TOCICO would grow to be independent and that TOC would grow and live without his direct involvement. He might be the strong tribal leader but he wants the tribe to have a future without him. I see this coming true though perhaps not fast enough for some members.

So what should the conference look like next year. Well we already know that it will be in Miami in November. The conference is returning to the 2004 venue. I'd personally like to see some changes. The value for me in attending the conference is in the opportunity to network and interact with the other thought leaders in the community. It's that once in a year opportunity to try and push the envelope and develop new knowledge from the intersection of others ideas with mine. However, I see some famous names in the space missing - published authors. In fact, I bought two books from the bookstore this year. Neither author was present at the conference. What a pity! So next year, I'd like to see a more interactive conference - less Eli, more community interaction. There was a suggestion for an "open space" event. I think that's a splendid idea. Perhaps a whole afternoon could be dedicated to open space. I'd also like to see more formal tracks organized by domain e.g. manufacturing, distribution, finance (throughput accounting), and so forth. This might relegate my work in software to a miscellaneous track but I can live with that. I'd also like to see a formal dinner with an awards presentation. This year we awarded Oded Cohen the life membership in recognition of his long service to the TOC community and body of knowledge but the award was tacked on to the end of one of Eli's sessions. It wasn't tribal enough. The awards need to be stronger. The Agile Alliance gets this. At the Agile Conference dinner, there was the Gordon Pask Award. The prize was $10,000. Both the award and the ceremony to present it showed how strongly the agile tribe valued its emerging leaders. The TOCICO could learn some lessons from this.

And finally, some soothsaying read from my crystal ball. Eli has let the patterns genie out of the bottle. Expect a plethora of TOC and Viable Vision patterns to be published in the next few years. Expect half the paper submissions for the 2007 conference to contain the word "template" in the title. Expect confusion from all of these patterns. And then let me be the first to start the post-patterns movement in TOC with a return to the basics and the 5 focusing steps. And for those with a headache, just take two Thinking Processes and see me again in the morning...

[Pictures: Top Right - Eli Goldratt; Top Left - Eli Schragenheim (contributed the Foreword to my book); Bottom Right - Gerry Kendall (author of Viable Vision, Advanced Portfolio Management, and Securing the Future); Justin Roff-Marsh - revolutionizing sales management with his paradigm shifting ideas based on TOC; more pictures another day]