As noted in an earlier article I’ve started re-reading Overcoming Organizational Defenses with the intent of seeing how to integrate Argyris’s approach with TOC.

Confirmation that my intuition may have taken me down a fruitful path comes from Chapter 1 “Puzzles”:

“The players in these studies also take for granted policies and practices that are contrary to their managerial stewardship. They bypass root causes. They equate being realistic with being simplistic. They make all these actions undiscussable. They thus wind up creating a world in which the bad is tied up with the good so that producing the latter guarantees the former. Finally all of this is done with the best of intentions”

Which also sounds like the sort of situation a CRT was designed to explore!