Building the Current Reality Tree (CRT)
In the last posting
we presented the business case for analysis and asked if anyone had ideas on
how to help Bill with this analysis. The
Dome Company appears to be a company in chaos and what is required is to help
them develop a path forward to improve. We
did receive a few recommendations, but one of them stood out by recommending the
construction of a simple Current Reality Tree (CRT). In the next several postings, we will do just
that. We intend to build this CRT methodically so that everyone who is not totally familiar with CRT’s will see what
powerful information can be gleaned from it. Remember one of the keys to improvement is the recognition of the many cause and effect relationships that exist and that most of the time, if we simply take our time to identify the one or two core problems and "fix" them, most of the symptoms we see will disappear.
Develop the Undesirable Effect (UDE) List
From
the business case you can instantly deduce many undesirable effects (UDEs) that
are taking place within this company.
The important step here is to determine the important few from the
frivolous many. In others words
determine which ones are important and which ones aren’t so important. Many times an original UDE list is only one
side of the story and it’s usually the management side. Every story usually has two, or more, sides
and it’s important to get ALL sides of the story. So, how do you do that? First, is what you are being told is the
problem – is it real? Second, would be
from observation of the system. What do
YOU see as you watch products move through the system? What do you hear when you talk with people on
the line? Third, would be validation that what you are being told actually
exists. Many times what someone thinks is happening can be far removed
from what is actually happening. This UDE gap can widen between what you are
told versus what actually exists.
With
an accurate and robust UDE list you can determine ALL of the system effects, in
this case the undesirable effects. We
see the system effects, now we must understand the cause for these effects. For
every person who reads the business case the UDE list would most likely be
similar but, different. Each person might focus on, and highlight, different
comments and observations for their UDE list.
Not to worry. Many times the
difference can be overcome with emphasized scrutiny using the CLR’s (see
posting 192 and 192B for an explanation of the CLR’s). So, let’s build the list and start from
there. A good list will consist of 5 –
10 UDEs. It’s a place to start and more
UDEs will probably surface when you start to build a CRT. To develop the UDE list, answer the question:
“It bothers me that….” Our list would include:10 Dome is losing sales
20-time delivery is poor
30 Some orders are sometimes entered incorrectly
40 Quality is becoming a problem
50 Production has many change orders
60 Some customers want Dome to pay a late charge
70 New Product design/development seems slow
This list is probably good enough to start. We’ve hit some of the highlights from the business case. Now we need to take these effects and start assembling into a CRT to surface the cause.
Building the Current Reality Tree
(CRT)
First, look for two entity statements that look like
they might be related to each other in terms of cause-and-effect. Remember: the CRT is sufficiency based logic, so the
logic statements are “If entity A …Then, entity B”.
(NOTE: The number with the asterisk in the box is strictly a
number system to give an entity address. This number (or a multiple of it – e.g. entity
1 x 10 = 10 which is the designation used here) is how it appeared on the UDE
list. The asterisk indicates that this
entity came from the original UDE list.
This can be important to distinguish between original UDEs and surfaced
UDEs.)
It would appear that
“poor on-time delivery” would be sufficient to cause a “loss of sales.” The next question would be, “Is there
anything else on our list that could happen because of poor on-time delivery?
It appears as if
entity 60 can also be an effect of late on-time delivery. From here you can work the tree in two
different directions. First, look for
any effects on the list that might be caused by entity 10, or entity 60. Second, you can ask the question, “What
caused entity 20?” For sake of
discussion let’s look on our list and see if we can identify a cause for entity
20. There is a possible connection
between entity 20 and 50 on our list – “Production has many change orders.”
1.) Is there another effect on our list that
comes from entity 50?
2.) What caused entity 50?
3.) What is the effect of entity 10?
4.) What is the effect of entity 60?
Let’s look on the
list and see if there is something that could cause entity 50? If you look at the list you’ll notice 30 – “Some orders are entered incorrectly.” That statement would seem sufficient to
explain “why” production has many change orders. However, in this case we are going to invoke
the clarity reservation and add some clarity to the statement. We will change the statement to read: “Some
orders are incorrectly entered into the system.”
In our next posting we'll continue building our CRT, complete it, and then move on to our next Thinking Process Tool, the Conflict Diagram.
Bob Sproull
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