This Focused Performance Weblog is a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective. TOC is noted for its applications in Project Management and Multi-Project Management (Critical Chain) and Operations Management (Drum-Buffer-Rope), as well as in Marketing, Strategic Planning and Change Management (TOC Thinking Processes). If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
Sunday, March 20, 2005
McLuhan's Wake -- Just finished what I decided will be just a first watching of McLuhan's Wake, a documentary portrait of 20th century communications thinker. If your cable provider sends you the Sundance Channel, I strongly recommend you check it out when it repeats next week.
I was unaware of the basis of McLuhan's book, Laws of Media: The New Science, around which the film revolved. These four questions...
- What does the artifact enhance or intensify or make possible or accelerate?
- If some aspect of a situation is enlarged or enhanced, simultaneously the old condition or unenhanced situation is displaced thereby. What is pushed aside or obsolesced by the new "organ"?
- What recurrence or retrieval of earlier actions and services is brought into play simultaneously by the new form? What older, previously obsolesced ground is brought back and inheres in the new form?
- When pushed to the limits of its potential … the new form will tend to reverse what had been its original characteristics. What is the reversal potential of the new form?
...are applied in the film to "tools" and "media," but are also key questions to ask about any proposed change or innovation.
Perhaps it appeals to me because it seems that the Theory of Constraints Thinking Processes, when used as a problem solving method for complex situation, combined with TOC's Five Focusing Steps, provides a structure for addressing some of these issues. The "desired effects" of the a Future Reality Tree relate to the enhancements. Subordination to the strategy to address a system's constraint (Focusing Step 3) requires one to determine and/or be aware of what is now obsolete in the desired system. And the conscious solicitation of concerns -- Negative Branch Reservations -- is one way of trying to foresee reversals. Not sure, however, about a similar direct link to "retrieval," without being tempted to identify the retrieval as a desired effect of the change, which is probably pushing the limits of prescience.
Admittedly, my quick and dirty application of McLuhan's questions is a bit more future-directed and prediction-related than his use of them to assess the present in terms of past, but useful nonetheless.
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