Every station equal
Tests the belief that a line meets its plan when every step averages the plan. About 23 of 35 chips finish, and almost no team meets the plan.
Tools for the making
Resources
Workshops, posters and essays drawn from Strategy Is the Making, made for teams that want to put the book’s ideas to work. More will arrive as the book nears publication.
Workshop and kit
The Dice Game
Five players and five dice show why the slowest step sets the pace for everything else. The facilitator kit is free once you confirm your email address.
See the gamePlaylist and postersThe music of the book
Every chapter thinks through jazz recordings. Listen to them as a playlist, or print one as an 18 by 24 inch concert poster.
See the musicEssayEveryone got faster, and nothing shipped sooner
Why an artificial intelligence (AI) tool raises output only at the step that limits the whole system, with current research on adoption.
Read the essayWorkshop · Theory of Constraints
The Dice Game shows a team the one step that sets the pace for everything else.
Five players get five dice and a plan that matches the average roll. The team still falls short, in front of everyone, and nobody can be blamed for it. In twenty-five minutes a leadership team sees why its output depends on its slowest step, and why effort spent anywhere else leaves the result where it was.
Get the facilitator kit- Time
- About 25 minutes of play and a short debrief.
- Group
- Five players a team, with any number of teams.
- Format
- In person with dice and chips, or on Zoom with a shared spreadsheet.
- From the book
- Chapter 04 on constraints, which draws on Eliyahu Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints, and Chapter 03 on rehearsal.
The rounds
Each round tests a belief leaders hold about raising output.
Speed up four stations
Tests the belief that adding capacity everywhere raises output. About 30 finish. Chips pile up in front of station 3, the one station left as it was.
Pace new work to the slowest station
Tests the belief that a station sitting idle is wasted capacity. About 30 still finish, with far less work left waiting in the line.
Double one station, as an artificial intelligence tool might
Tests the belief that any productivity gain helps. Doubling station 2 changes nothing. Doubling station 3 lifts output to about 34, and the limit moves somewhere new.
Only a change at the slowest station moves the result.
Each station can pass only what reached it, and every roll varies. A good day is capped by the chips waiting, and a bad day is never made up.
Improving a nonconstraining resource may create local efficiency while leaving the performance of the whole unchanged.
Strategy Is the Making · Chapter 04
Downloads
Everything a facilitator needs to run the game with a team.
- The whole kit in one download
Every file in the facilitator kit in a single ZIP archive.
ZIPFacilitator kit - Study guide
The rules, the rounds, the story of Herbie and the discussion questions, for participants to keep.
PDFParticipant pack - One-page rules
The five rules and a worked practice day, to show before Round 1.
PDFParticipant pack - Facilitator guide
Twelve slides with full speaker notes: the story of Herbie, the rules, Goldratt’s own words, step-by-step instructions, the results to expect and the move from bottleneck to crux.
PowerPointFacilitator kit - Scoring spreadsheet
One tab per team with the passing rule built in, and a summary tab for the whole class.
SpreadsheetFacilitator kit - Presenter script
The speaker notes as one document to print and keep beside you while the game runs.
PDFFacilitator kit
Every file arrives once your email address is confirmed.
Choose the participant pack or the full facilitator kit, which includes it. We send a confirmation link to your address. Opening that link confirms the address is yours and takes you straight to your downloads, and the same links arrive in a second email to keep.
- Enter your address and choose a pack.
- Confirm it from the email we send.
- Download from the page the link opens, or from the email that follows.
Adapted from the match game in Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox, The Goal (North River Press, 1984). Expected results come from 20,000 simulated games of each round, five stations over ten days, starting from an empty line.
The music of the book
Every chapter of the book thinks through a recording you can hear.
Strategy Is the Making uses jazz recordings to show how a group listens, coordinates and changes tempo. The playlist gathers them in the book’s order, and the posters set eight of them as concert bills.
Playlist
PostersStrategy Is the Making: The Recordings
The recordings discussed in the book, in the order the chapters take them up.
The Interlude Posters
Eight recordings from the book, each set as a concert bill and printable at 18 by 24 inches. The PDFs arrive by email.
See the postersListening guideJazz & Poetry
What each performance in the book demonstrates, chapter by chapter, with the interludes and the poems that travel with them.
Open the listening guideTyshawn Sorey’s Pillars is on neither service. Apple Music carries a 1989 Ekaya recording of “The Wedding” in place of the 1985 version the book cites.
Work with Will
A facilitated session carries the lesson into your own decisions.
Will runs the Dice Game and other sessions from the book with leadership teams, in half-day, full-day and three-day workshops fitted to the decisions each team faces.
Sources
William Haas Evans, Strategy Is the Making: How Organizations Shape What Becomes Possible (forthcoming), Chapters 03 and 04.
Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox, The Goal (North River Press, 1984), Chapters 13 to 15.