divein coaching

Theory of constraints, vocation and learning

17 September 2013

From the mother of all knowledge, Wikipedia, Theory of Constraints (TOC) is defined as:

The theory of constraints (TOC) is a management paradigm that views any manageable system as being limited in achieving more of its goals by a very small number of constraints. There is always at least one constraint, and TOC uses a focusing process to identify the constraint and restructure the rest of the organization around it.

If you look closely, TOC is probably the modern version of vocational tests as a way to guide learning. Reason is that learning is no longer the response to a lifelong vocation, but instead a minute-by-minute, ever changing need in regular daily lives. For example, at this point I might need to learn how to write a short script to scrape a number of pages for my a paper I have to write, while in two hours I will need to learn the best possible way to run a meeting where members tend to be unfocused. None of these skills are captured by vocational tests, and yet these two skills are what I need the most at those very moments since without them I am highly constrained. My paper writing might take forever without scraping, and my meeting will be a disaster.

If you then think of learning as being determined by TOC, the two problems people putting learning systems in place will face are:

  1. Problem identification: How do you help people that the problem they have is addressable by a given skill? For example, I might think that writing that paper will indeed take six months, and that my messy meeting is just the way it is.
  2. Skill identification: How do you help somebody find out that, once they identify a problem, what they need to learn is a specific skill, when in multiple cases they might not even be aware of that skill? For example, most people don't know what scraping is.

Problem and skill identification are both coaching components, and as we recently learned from Tutorspree's experience, coaching is difficult to scale. Lots of work ahead of educators.

by Ricardo Pietrobon

About Me

My name is Ricardo Pietrobon and I am interested in big data and situated cognition applied to immersive distance education.