I’ve got better things to do than be distracted by your tinkering with TOC.

That said, take a look at…

http://www.focusedperformance.com/misc/SynesthesiaCRT.gif

…for a very rough starting point (still relatively “long arrows” and with no “bananas” indicating “AND” logic…but like I said, I should be working on stuff that pays.)

Embarrassment and threat come from avoiding poor perceived performance, and usually those perceptions are driven by erroneous or conflicting measures. We get so good at making these local measures look good, we start to believe our own footwork.

Since, as Goldratt is oft heard saying “Tell me how you’ll measure me and I’ll tell you how I’ll behave,” metrics drive behaviors (including and especially the internal metrics about embarrassment and threat), you’ll often find them either at the root of such problems — or worse — as reinforcing loop roots.

Note that this is a rough cut against the main points you started with. The other symptoms you mentioned could equally be starting points for building a CRT and/or could/should be merged into this one — they sound very familiar as components of what we in the TOC world refer to as a fairly generic “human behavior CRT” — most of them are subsets of your entities about skillful defenses and footwork.

Also note that I don’t know the Argyris book at the core of your analysis. I may be way off base.

That said, if there is something wrong about the thinking process, it probably comes from the erroneous premise that the performance of a system is simply the additive performance of its parts, which leads to emphasis of local players on local performance, to the detriment of global/team performance and to games to protect oneself.

By the way…There’s an alternative approach to building CRTs, based on the conflicts/dillemas associated with the presenting symptoms rather than brute force searches for cause-effect links. Maybe some day I’ll take a crack at your/Argyris’ seven symptoms.

However your interest is much appreciated – I’ve been impressed by your grip of issues and your comment reinforces that.

I haven’t had the time to work through the implications of the quick tree you have put up – in general it feels right but there is one area that I think will merit further exploration – you have an entity “local measures are often out of sync with global needs and with other local measures” – I can understand why a TOC focus would lead you to suggest that entity, my instinct (not yet proven) is that Argyris’s theories would suggest that even global measures (since they are devised and monitored by human beings) suffer from the biases inherent in standard human behaviour as explained in his model. (for want of a better example think of the fiction that is “standard costs”!)

As you may have noticed I’m a student here – I know a little about TOC and a little about Argyris’s stuff – I’m following my instinct that the two areas of learning are mutually reinforcing if we can put them into a clear map. Where I’m aiming is to derive some new ideas about effectively delivering technology into a business (since that IS my day job!)

Using a drawing tool plugin for the wiki software to aid visual thinking and noting…