It's Not Luck

While The Goal gave us the Five Focusing Steps for physical constraints, It’s Not Luck introduces the Thinking Processes — a logical toolkit for solving complex problems, especially policy constraints and conflicts.

Five tools, five questions:

1. Current Reality Tree — What to change?
2. Evaporating Cloud — What to change to?
3. Future Reality Tree — Will it work?
4. Prerequisite Tree — What’s in the way?
5. Transition Tree — What actions?

Each produces output that feeds the next. Skip steps and you fail in predictable ways.

If you know about a problem and it persists, something is stopping you from solving it. That something is almost always a perceived trade-off.

The interesting question shifts from “why does this exist?” to “why haven’t we solved it?”

Most answers reduce to: “I believe I can’t have X without losing Y.” That belief is either a valid constraint or an assumption worth challenging.

Most conflicts aren’t real — they rest on hidden assumptions. The cloud makes them visible.

                A: Common Objective
                        │
             ┌──────────┴──────────┐
             │                     │
             v                     v
       B: Requirement        C: Requirement
             │                     │
             v                     v
       D: Position ◄── conflict ──► D': Position

Both sides want the same objective (A) but believe they need contradictory things (D vs D’). Surface the assumptions behind each arrow. Invalidate one, and the conflict evaporates.

The Current Reality Tree maps cause-effect chains from symptoms to root cause. But finding the root cause isn’t enough — you need to understand why it persists.

Root causes persist because of perceived conflicts. The EC structures that conflict. CRT answers what, EC answers why we haven’t fixed it.

The FRT is a flight simulator for your solution. Take the injection from the EC, trace its effects forward through cause-effect logic.

Two things to check:

• Does it eliminate the undesirable effects from the CRT?
• Does it create new problems (negative branch reservations)?

For every “what could go wrong,” either add a preventive injection or modify the solution. Critics become contributors — they’re stress-testing your logic, not attacking your idea.

The Prerequisite Tree captures obstacles (“we can’t because…”) and converts each into an intermediate objective — a state that overcomes the obstacle. Not actions, states.

The Transition Tree then breaks each intermediate objective into concrete action sequences with explicit cause-effect logic: given reality and need, if we do X, then Y results.

PRT answers “what conditions must exist.” TT answers “what exactly do we do.”

CRT ──► EC ──► FRT ──► PRT ──► TT ──► Implementation
 │       │       │       │       │
 │       │       │       │       └─ What actions?
 │       │       │       └───────── What's in the way?
 │       │       └───────────────── Will it work?
 │       └───────────────────────── What to change to?
 └───────────────────────────────── What to change?

Skip CRT: solve the wrong problem. Skip EC: fight symptoms. Skip FRT: solution creates new problems. Skip PRT: get stuck on obstacles. Skip TT: vague plan, inconsistent execution.