About this Presentation
Simon Copsey uses the parallels between parenting and management to show why well-intended actions can create the very problems leaders are trying to solve. In both roles, the job is to help other people succeed without directly experiencing their situation or controlling every decision they make. That makes it essential to distinguish helpful actions, based on valid assumptions about reality, from unhelpful actions, based on invalid assumptions. The first half uses a parenting example to introduce TOC cause-and-effect thinking. Symptoms such as lying, acting out, resolving conflicts through power, and failing to develop independent judgment are mapped in a Current Reality Tree. The analysis traces those outcomes back to the parent making decisions for the child and using punishment to drive compliance. An Evaporating Cloud then explores the apparent conflict between giving the child autonomy and telling the child what to do. By surfacing the assumptions behind both sides, the conflict changes: what seems easier in the short term can create long-term dependency, while allowing and teaching decision-making can support both the child's autonomy and the parent's goal. Copsey then applies the same logic to a call center. Frustrated customers, rising costs, high attrition, and increasing call volume can trigger isolated fixes such as more training, a hiring freeze, bonuses, or hiding the phone number. A Current Reality Tree instead reveals a deeper policy: treating the call center as a cost to minimize and incentivizing agents to keep calls short. Short calls can drive repeat contacts, failure demand, disengagement, additional staffing, and still higher cost. An Evaporating Cloud exposes the assumption that shorter calls require fewer agents and replaces it with a more useful one: resolving issues on first contact can reduce both call volume and staffing pressure. The broader lesson is that managers improve systems by examining their own assumptions and the causal structure behind recurring symptoms rather than reacting to each symptom independently.
What Will You Learn
To help you get the most value from this session, we’ve highlighted a few key points. These takeaways capture the main ideas and practical insights from the presentation, making it easier for you to review, reflect, and apply what you’ve learned.
Why management and parenting share a core challenge: helping other people succeed without directly controlling their situation means actions must be chosen from valid assumptions, not just good intentions.
How a Current Reality Tree can trace multiple visible symptoms back to an underlying cause and prevent managers from spending energy on fixes that only move problems elsewhere.
How an Evaporating Cloud surfaces the assumptions behind an apparent conflict and creates a path to a win/win solution instead of settling for an unstable compromise.
How local management policies such as minimizing call length can create failure demand, repeat work, disengagement, and higher cost—and why first-contact resolution can better align customer outcomes and resource use.
Instructor(s)
Simon Copsey
Simon is a transformation consultant turned manager, helping organizations unwind complex obstacles in weeks, not years, so happier staff can deliver better software to customers sooner. His career has taken him from working in the trenches across the full software lifecycle to helping leaders find pragmatic solutions to complex problems using the scientific method and modern management theory.
Shaun Pidcock
Shaun Pidcock
Development & Delivery Manager at TfL
Today Shaun is Project Director at Highways England, currently working on the Lower Thames Crossing project. The case study presented at this conference was from when he worked at Transport for London.
Ian Heptinstall
Ian is an Associate Professor of Project Management at the University of Birmingham (UK).
He is a late-career academic, joining the University after 35 years of working in project management, procurement and management consulting.
His project & procurement experience primarily in the capex, construction & engineering fields.
He has been a regular TOCICO Conference attendee since 2011, and in 2020 he helped set up the annual Critical Chain virtual conference, to share CC real world experience with project management practitioners who have little or no knowledge of TOC or critical chain.
In 2016 he published “The Executive Guide to Breakthrough Project Management” about overcoming obstacles to using critical chain on capital/construction projects, in collaboration with Robert Bolton, and he supported Rene Nibbelke in producing the APM’s “Senior Managers’ and Project Managers’ Guide to Critical Chain” (2024