A wise person learns from others’ mistakes. Mistakes are common even though most are
preventable! Serious mistakes occur in business, government, and even in personal lives.
Frequently mistakes are caused by not recognizing the situation, environment or system
(referred to as system hereafter). The tendency is to hide or dismiss mistakes. That in
itself is a mistake! Many times, by examining system causalities, actions can be planned
and taken to either prevent the mistake or to reduce its impact. Two types of common
mistakes to thinking clearly (defined as recognizing the system causalities) are
identified and studied: 1.the proposed action does not solve the system problem; 2. the
proposed action solves the system problem but causes some unintended serious negative
consequences. Eliyahu M. Goldratt developed the theory of constraints (TOC) thinking
processes (TP) to apply the scientific method to solving business problems. Rather than
select a personal or business problem, since science is based on causality within reality,
three major scientific activities, inference (type 1 mistake), observation (type 2
mistake), and prediction (types 1 and 2 mistake prevention) are used to provide a tutorial
on the TP and its use in addressing these types of mistakes.
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