About this Presentation
Georgijs Buklovskis examines a recurring TOC implementation problem: organizations can achieve significant improvements, create enthusiasm, and gain buy-in, only to see the results disappear later. He proposes adding a fourth challenge to Goldratt's three questions: not only what to change, what to change to, and how to cause the change, but how to sustain the change. The central argument is that one organizational goal creates two different management systems. OPS exists to run the business and deliver today; it values stability, execution, flow, short time horizons, and protection from variability. IMPROVE exists to build future capability; it values change, learning, development, longer time horizons, and working through uncertainty. Both are essential, but they compete for the organization's best resources and operate on different management clocks. When OPS dominates, urgent work and firefighting consume improvement capacity and the future stagnates. When IMPROVE dominates, experimental and development priorities can destabilize current operations and damage delivery. Buklovskis identifies the structural problem as shared operational resources combined with undefined ownership of the trade-offs. His proposed injection is deliberate separation: protect capacity for OPS and IMPROVE, establish clear decision boundaries and conflict-resolution rules, and make business leadership explicitly responsible for trade-offs between them. The separation journey can begin with protected time, then governance, and eventually independent structures where IMPROVE develops new capability and OPS scales and exploits it. Sustainability also requires protecting the management logic from leadership changes, ERP replacements, KPI regression, ownership changes, cost-accounting logic, and local optimization. The ultimate protection is culture: TOC survives when the organization no longer depends on particular people to remember the rules because the decision logic has become the normal way work is managed.
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 successful TOC results can fade even after strong early improvement: the management logic that produced them may never become protected or institutionalized.
How OPS and IMPROVE serve the same organizational goal but require different purposes, rhythms, KPIs, decision rules, and mindsets for today's flow versus tomorrow's capability.
Why shared resources and unclear ownership of trade-offs create a structural conflict, and how deliberate separation of capacity, governance, and eventually structure can protect both systems.
How to make TOC sustainable by blocking the return of local-efficiency and cost-accounting logic, using pre-flight checks before major changes, and embedding TOC decision logic into organizational culture.
Instructor(s)
Georgijs Buklovskis
Georgijs Buklovskis is the owner and lead consultant of B4B Solutions and a partner of GIG Europe (Goldratt Implementation Group). He is a certified Logical Thinking Process Master under William Dettmer (GSI, USA) and works internationally in the areas of Theory of Constraints implementation, operational transformation, and management system design.
He has extensive experience in the creation, development, and leadership of international manufacturing companies, as well as in consulting engagements across a wide range of industries. His work focuses on sustainable TOC implementation, Throughput Accounting, flow management, leadership alignment, and organizational decision-making.
Georgijs is also an author and trainer. He wrote the book “Transformation” and has contributed to spreading TOC knowledge through publishing and educational activities, including editions of works by Eliyahu Goldratt and Thomas Corbett in the Latvian language.
He is a lecturer and trainer at KIC (Komercizglītības Centrs), one of Latvia’s leading business education and corporate training organizations, and a co-founder and expert of the Business Efficiency Association (BEA).
In recognition of his international professional contribution, he was awarded the Knight of the Order of Orange-Nassau by the Kingdom of the Netherlands.