About this Presentation
One of the pinnacles of an academic’s career is completing a PhD. While this is always an ambitious endeavour, TOC provides a well-proven suite of thinking process tools (the TP) to assist the research process (Mabin et al, TOCICO 2016). However, in the process of Abeer Youssef’s PhD research, dealing with a real-life, potentially disastrous situation, we realized we needed a new TP tool for a situation that isn't covered by the existing TP. We adapted the existing tools to develop a new tool which we have called the Conditional Reality Tree. The Conditional Reality Tree applies to situations where the Undesirable Effects (UDEs) in the current reality are likely to get worse in the future due to some impending event or trend, and inadequate corrective action being taken. Since it lies in the future, the CRT cannot be used, but also, since the future is expected to contain many UDEs rather than DEs, the usual Future Reality Tree is not appropriate. We realized that there are many other situations where this problem of a worsening situation or a pending disaster arises, occurring in business, personal and societal settings. These could all benefit from having a reality tree to depict the situation clearly so that others can recognize there is an issue to be dealt with properly. Therefore we are sharing the new tool that we developed and used in this research, to help others facing similar future situations that the existing TP cannot handle. In this presentation, we will discuss the problematic situation, introduce the new tool (the Conditional Reality Tree), and provide several examples of its application.
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.
Instructor(s)
Abeer Youssef
Abeer Youssef, PhD, Adjunct Research Fellow, Wellington School of Business and Government, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand, and Lecturer, Graduate School of Business (GSB), The Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport (AASTMT), Alexandria, Egypt Abeer Youssef is an Adjunct Research Fellow in the School of Management at Victoria University of Wellington, NZ as well as a Lecturer at the Graduate School of Business (GSB), The Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport (AASTMT), Alexandria, Egypt. Dr Youssef obtained a Civil Engineering Bachelor’s degree, then her Diploma and Master’s degrees in Construction Engineering and Management. Her PhD at Victoria University of Wellington focused on fields related to risk management, conflict management, managing disputes over shared watercourses, water supply management, and thinking tools and decision-making techniques. She has worked as a Teaching Assistant (TA) and as a lecturer at many universities and educational institutions worldwide. She has authored/co-authored many publications in the management field. She is an expert in risk management, planning and scheduling, and cost management. She has provided consultations for several international companies and organisations in such fields. Since 2004, she worked closely with community development organizations that fight poverty in rural areas, enhancing people’s education and awareness, reading for blind people, supporting addicts to recover and helping them to be involved in society again as good citizens in Egypt. She held several political positions. She also won the election of the Engineering Syndicate to become a Council Member at the Engineers Syndicate in Alexandria in 2014. She is now the Special Officer (SO) of the United Nations Association of New Zealand (UNANZ) for Humanitarian Affairs and a Member of the National Council and Executive Council of UNANZ.
Ms Alka Wadhwa
Alka Wadhwa is an experienced consultant and process improvement expert with over 24 years of expertise in the Theory of Constraints (TOC), Lean Six Sigma, and organizational performance optimization. She has successfully led projects in healthcare, financial services, and manufacturing, driving significant improvements such as a 67% boost in hospital operations and a 140% increase in outpatient visits.
Previously, Alka Wadhwa spent 17+ years at GE Global Research Center, where she led initiatives to enhance various GE businesses through advanced technologies, process redesign, and system optimization. Founder of Better Solutions Consulting, LLC, she specializes in using TOC, Six Sigma, and data analytics to streamline operations and build high-performance teams.
Her work has earned her multiple accolades, including the Empire State Award of Excellence in healthcare.
Vicky Mabin
Vicky Mabin, PhD FORS is Adjunct Professor at the Victoria University of Wellington’s School of Business and Government. She has taught several hundred students about TOC and conducted and supervised many projects using TOC. Vicky led the first implementation of TOC in New Zealand in 1987, and has written over 200 journal articles, books, chapters, conference papers, teaching texts, and technical reports, many of which are on TOC. She is leading author of TOC TP articles, and co-author of The World of TOC (2000), bibliographical articles on TOC, and co-creator of the TOC research articles database.
Vicky served on the TOCICO Board of Directors from 2016–2019 and is a frequent presenter at TOCICO and Operations Research/Decision Sciences conferences. She has received top awards including Fellow of the ORS (UK), the ORSNZ’s premier award the Hans Daellenbach Prize for her contributions to the theory and application of OR, particularly TOC, and most recently the Griffiths Medal for the best paper in the last 2 years in the Health Systems journal.