Contents

If you’re new to the blog, you should know that I like the Theory of Constraints a lot (see a primer worth reading before going further).

This blog post is about a Claude skill I made encoding ToC’s “Thinking Processes,” which I contend can probably help you find solutions for most every problem you are facing. If you want to try the skill, go into your command line and run (assuming you already use Claude Code):

claude plugin marketplace add abromberg/toc-coaching-skill
claude plugin install toc-coaching@toc-marketplace

Then pop open claude and type /toc-coaching [whatever your problem is].

It will begin to ask you questions, generate diagrams, and pull the solution out of you.

The repo with code is here. Here’s a shot of an in-progress “Evaporating Cloud” and the next (structured!) question for the user, making it easy to keep moving through the exercise:

The Thinking Processes

ToC, thankfully, is more than just a good theory of how systems work. Its creator, Eli Goldratt, also created what he refers to as the “Thinking Processes”. I think these can be used to solve just about any problem.

The Thinking Processes — the Current Reality Tree (CRT), the Evaporating Cloud (EC), and the like — are highly structured lines of inquiry which help perform the necessary ToC steps to solve your problem.

Most every time I have rigorously followed these Thinking Processes when faced with a problem, they have led me straight to the solution. It’s hard to overstate this. We tend to think our current problems are extremely hard to solve — perhaps impossible, or that they require some epiphany from on high. But in practice, when faced with a problem, I’ve found that ToC’s Thinking Processes can reliably give me the solution (!).

(Of course, actually executing the solution is sometimes quite difficult! The Thinking Processes help you figure out what to do, but often you then simply need to apply High Effort.)

These problems can be in business, in personal life, whatever. Most everything can be modeled as a system, and most any situation you seek to change can be modeled as a problem.

So we’ve got this magical formula to solve problems. What’s the issue?

Well, in my experience, it’s that the Thinking Processes are a bit of a pain to follow. They are quite structured and require working through some mundane background on the situation at hand, and as a result, I tend to half-ass the work and don’t get to the promised land.

It’s like any piece of advice — “eat clean and move your body” is obviously effective, and yet many people don’t do it. And just so, “painstakingly work through the Thinking Processes” is obviously (to me) effective, and yet I often don’t adhere.

The easiest way to do them is to have someone who understands the theory well interview you, rather than sitting down and doing it solo. But these people are hard to find and busy. And we have LLMs now! They can interview us according to a programmatic flow!

The Skill

So, anyway, all that led to my Thinking Processes Claude skill. I want to be clear that none of the ideas are mine — they are Eli Goldratt and the broader ToC community’s. I’ve just encoded them into a flow that you can install and easily perform.

Here’s all you have to do:

claude plugin marketplace add abromberg/toc-coaching-skill
claude plugin install toc-coaching@toc-marketplace

Then pop open claude and type /toc-coaching [whatever your problem is].

The agent will begin to interview you, working through the phases of the Thinking Processes. Initially there will be a discovery phase where it is just picking up context and background. Then it will begin to move into the formal Processes, including diagrams and structured breakdowns. Eventually it will propose solutions to the problems.

I’ve been running this for the past week and it has been incredible. I urge you to try it out, even just once, on a problem you’re facing — and stick with it all the way through.

Bonus: data sources

This all gets way better if you use something like Obsidian for your personal notes. I now frequently start up ToC sessions and tag in files, call notes, and longform writing from my Obsidian to feed context to the agent, and the results get so much better.

I also strongly recommend using a voice-to-text tool like Handy, Wispr Flow or their ilk. Then you can just ramble into the microphone about the situation, and the ToC agent will work with even more info.

As sessions wrap up, it also writes a /docs/toc-sessions/ file with a summary. This can be very helpful to tag in when you start a new session related to a prior one as well.

The more data it has, the faster it will get to the right Thinking Process and conclusion. Feed it as much as you can!

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