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The Perry Approach is a ten-phase method for working with the conflict between where you are and where you want to be. Built on the Evaporating Cloud from the Theory of Constraints, it was developed by Karl Perry for the messy, beautiful complexity of human conflict — internal, interpersonal, and organisational.

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Where it came from

Karl first encountered the Evaporating Cloud in 2005, on a Theory of Constraints intensive in Huntly, New Zealand. The method itself came from Dr Eliyahu Goldratt — an Israeli physicist who recognised that most stuck systems aren't blocked by physical constraints. They're blocked by hidden assumptions.

Goldratt's original Evaporating Cloud was designed for business conflicts: production versus quality, centralisation versus local autonomy, standardisation versus customisation. It worked because it surfaced the assumptions sustaining the conflict and made them testable. Once an assumption was named, it could be challenged. Once challenged, it often dissolved — and the conflict dissolved with it.

In 1994, Goldratt's novel It's Not Luck extended the method to personal conflicts. His daughter, Efrat Goldratt-Ashlag, went further — naming the deepest tension running through every human conflict as the pull between security (the confidence that what we expect to happen will happen) and satisfaction (the sense of achievement that requires moving beyond what we already know). We need both. They often pull in opposite directions. That isn't a flaw; it's the human condition.

At that point, the Evaporating Cloud stopped being a business tool. It became a map of human experience.

What Karl added

Over twenty years of applying the method across aviation, healthcare, manufacturing, public sector, and union–management work, Karl noticed where the original Evaporating Cloud shone — and where it hit walls. The Perry Approach evolved to address four gaps:

1. Start where you are. The current state (D’) sits at the bottom of the cloud, honoured rather than judged. Where you are right now — the behaviour, the pattern, the situation that keeps you stuck — exists for legitimate reasons. The work is to understand those reasons, not override them.
2. Map hidden benefits explicitly. Most cloud work stays abstract about needs. The Perry Approach asks specifically: what would you actually lose if you changed? That's where the real need lives — and until it's named precisely, no alternative can honour it.
3. Three thinking modes, not one. Deductive thinking maps the cloud. Abductive thinking challenges the assumptions holding it in place. Inductive thinking builds new patterns through repeated practice. Most methods rely on one mode. Lasting change requires all three.
4. Transcendence, not compromise. The breakthrough isn't choosing between needs and wants, or splitting the difference. It's finding a bigger version of your current belief that can include the needs of your future — a larger belief structure that no longer requires the current behaviour to protect what matters.

The result is a ten-phase process documented in this book and practised live each week in the Conflict Club.

How this connects to the wider work

The Perry Approach is the methodological foundation of two pathways.

The first is to become a ThinkingCoach — a coach who supports leaders and teams to gain clarity, dissolve conflict, and change things. This is the YourThinkingCoach pathway — Levels 1 to 4:

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The Conflict Club

Level 1: The Conflict Club — Weekly live practice on real Evaporating Clouds, where the method becomes embodied. Your gateway into the practitioner community and the starting point for everything that follows.

Join the Conflict Club →

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Level 2: Conflict Club Host — Build your community by inviting and supporting others. Host your own Conflict Club sessions and earn affiliate revenue for every member you bring in. Hosting develops the relational capability that makes later facilitation clean and effective.

Find out more →

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Level 3: MYMindset® (LSI 1) — Deep exploration of your thinking patterns using the Life Styles Inventory. Eight weeks of formation work using the Evaporating Cloud and Three Cloud Method to develop your own Personal Development Plan.

Find out more →

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Level 4: MYLeadership® (LSI 2) — Building on Level 3, explore your behaviour patterns in depth. Ten weeks of continued formation work, deepening your self-knowledge and completing the personal development foundation for facilitation practice.

Coming soon

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