Chapter 10: Step 7 — Identifying the Undesirable Effects (UDEs)

David had read his cloud aloud. Sarah had read hers. Both had sat with the D vs D' conflict — held it long enough for the grammar to land, long enough for the discomfort to become a structure rather than a feeling.

Both arrived at the same place. Not resolution. Recognition.

"I can see it now," David said. "The whole shape of it. And I still feel just as stuck as before."

That is not a failure. It is exactly where this chapter begins. You have your cloud. You have read it aloud. You have sat with the conflict long enough to feel its weight. Now we ask what the conflict is costing you.

The question that surfaces the UDEs

Once you have sat with the D vs D' conflict long enough to hold it cleanly, one question opens the next move.

Ask it of yourself slowly. Then answer honestly.

The question does not ask what should happen. It does not ask what the cloud says ought to happen. It asks what does happen — in the actual week, in the actual room, in the actual body — when both pressures arrive at once and neither will give way.

The answers are not abstract. They are specific. They are the small concessions and the large ones. They are the late nights, the swallowed sentences, the work taken back, the messages not sent. They are the things you do to keep both sides of the cloud partly fed, none of which fully serve A.

Those answers are the undesirable effects.

UDEs are the compromises

In Theory of Constraints language, the symptoms an unresolved cloud generates are called undesirable effects — UDEs. They are not abstract symptoms. They are the compromises you make when both pressures bear down at once and the structure stays locked.

This is what makes UDE-mapping continuous with cloud-reading rather than separate from it. The grammar pass arrives at the D vs D' conflict. Sitting with the conflict raises the pressure on both sides. The elicitation question names what you do when that pressure becomes unbearable. The list of compromises is the list of UDEs.

Here is David, asked the question. "When you feel pressure not to take back work after setting up delegation, and you feel pressure to take back work to ensure quality, what happens? How do you compromise?"

He thought for a long time before he answered.

• "I delegate, then I shadow. I hand the work over and I keep my own copy open in the background, so I can intervene the moment I see something I would have done differently."
• "I take the work back at the last moment, not the first. I let the team get most of the way and then I 'just tidy it up' for the final hour. That way I can tell myself I delegated."
• "I check in 'lightly' more often than the work requires. I tell myself it is mentoring. I notice afterwards that I asked questions designed to steer the answer."
• "I move the goalposts. When the work comes back, I find something I did not ask for the first time round, and I send it back. The team learns that delegation is provisional."
• "I work the weekend. I rework what was delivered without telling anyone, and on Monday I act as if it was always like that."
• "I stop assigning the work that matters most. I keep the strategic pieces close, and I delegate only the tasks I trust to come back the way I would have done them."

Each of those is a compromise. None of them fully delivers B. None of them fully protects C. Every one of them produces a cost — to him, to the team, to the function — that he had not been counting because he had not been looking at the list.

Sarah, asked the same question against her cloud — pressure to have D (speak up, contribute) versus pressure to have D' (stay quiet, defer) — answered differently:

• "I write the comment in the chat instead of saying it. I tell myself I have raised it. I know the chat will not move the decision."
• "I speak, but I prefix everything. 'This may not be helpful, but…' 'I am not sure if this is the right moment, but…' By the time I am at the point, the room has moved on."
• "I agree publicly and dissent privately. I support the decision in the meeting and then I message a peer afterwards to share what I actually thought."
• "I save my disagreements for the small calls — the ones that do not really matter. That way I get to feel like I am speaking up, without risking the seat."
• "I let the men in the room finish my sentences for me. When one of them paraphrases what I started to say, I say 'yes, that' rather than completing my own thought."
• "I do not show up to the meetings that I know will be hard. I find a reason to be elsewhere. I tell myself I am protecting my energy."

The shape is different. The underlying structure is the same. Each is a compromise. Each partly serves one side of the cloud at the expense of the other. None of them serves A.

Mapping the compromises across three layers

Once you have the list, it helps to sort the compromises by where their cost lands.

Direct compromises — the cost to you

These are the effects that land on you personally, day by day.

• Exhaustion from the constant internal calibration of how much to give each side.
• Frustration with your own inability to commit fully to either route.
• Anxiety about which compromise to make in the moment.
• Guilt afterwards, whichever way you chose.
• A growing sense that you are working harder for less effect.

Direct compromises are the ones you are most aware of. They are also the ones that tempt you into short-term coping rather than structural change. Coping feels productive. It is not.

Secondary compromises — the cost to others

Your cloud does not stay inside you. It leaks.

• Team members read the inconsistency and adjust. They stop trusting the brief. They stop offering ideas you might overrule.
• Close relationships strain under the unpredictability. The people who love you learn the pattern, and protect themselves from it.
• Opportunities pass while you are partway between D and D'. Decisions are made in your absence; rooms close without you in them.
• Your reputation shifts as the pattern becomes visible. Others start describing you in shorthand that is not how you would describe yourself.

Secondary compromises are usually underestimated. Ask the people closest to your work what they have noticed. You may be surprised by how clearly they see the shape of your cloud from the outside.

Systemic compromises — the cost to the wider system

This is the layer most practitioners miss, and where the most sobering cost sits.

• Culture effects, because behaviour teaches more loudly than words. The compromises you make become the compromises the team learns to make.
• Performance limitations that show up as capacity problems rather than conflict problems. The function plateaus at the level your compromises permit.
• Innovation blocks, because risk is routed away from the cloud rather than through it. The conversations that would unlock new work never happen.
• Growth limitations, as the organisation reorganises itself around the conflict rather than dissolving it.

David reached this layer and stopped mid-sentence. He said, "My God. This is not just affecting me. It is constraining the entire function. People have stopped bringing me the work that needs my judgement, because they know I will rewrite it. So my judgement isn't reaching the work I was hired to shape."

Sarah said something similar. "The decisions I am not influencing are the ones the business most needs me to influence. My silence is shaping the company in a direction I would not choose if I were speaking."

That recognition is the point of the exercise. The cost of the cloud is not limited to your own discomfort. It ripples outward and shows up as conflict tax the system is quietly paying.

The destructive cycle

Look at your list of compromises and notice something. None of them fully delivers B. None of them fully protects C. And none of them moves you any closer to A.

That third observation is the one most practitioners miss on first reading.

When the structure is locked and you are compromising to keep both sides partly fed, you are not standing still. You are losing ground on A. The unified outcome you built the cloud around — sustained leadership impact, sustained senior influence, whatever your destination — quietly recedes. The compromises buy short-term relief at the cost of long-term direction.

And here is what turns the stuckness into a cycle. The further A drifts, the more pressure builds on both D and D'. Falling short of A makes both needs feel more urgent, not less. So you compromise harder. And the harder you compromise, the more A recedes. The system does not stay still. It deteriorates.

This is the structure David saw when he stopped mid-sentence earlier. His function was leaving leadership reach on the table. The longer that continued, the more pressure he felt to both delegate (to recover scale) and to take the work back (to recover quality). The more he compromised, the further his function fell behind. The more it fell behind, the harder he compromised.

Sarah described the same shape from the other direction. The decisions her silence was failing to influence shaped a business her voice would have shaped differently. The more that gap widened, the more pressure she felt to both speak up (to recover influence) and stay quiet (to preserve the seat). The compromises tightened. The gap kept widening.

Seen as a whole, your cloud is a system. Every element is doing a job.

• D' is protecting C.
• C is serving A.
• D threatens C, which is why resistance to change feels so strong.
• B is going unmet, which generates the pressure for change.
• The compromises are the safety valve — they release just enough pressure on either side to keep the system from collapsing, while never actually moving you toward A.

This is why willpower and reorganisation rarely produce durable movement. They push against one element of a system that is designed to reassert itself. And the system is not in static balance — it is in a slow, destructive drift. Each turn of the cycle takes a little more from A and asks a little more of D and D'.

You are not just stuck. You are on a destructive cycle. Seeing that is what makes the cloud feel heavier in the moment of recognition, not lighter.

That heaviness can be painful. It is also the most important thing you have surfaced so far.

Why seeing this matters — the machloket principle

There is a Hebrew word that names what changes when you see the cycle clearly: machloket (מחלוקת).

Machloket means dispute, disagreement, conflict. In the Talmudic tradition — the same tradition that shaped Eli Goldratt's thinking before he created the Evaporating Cloud — it carries a crucial distinction.

The Talmud (Pirkei Avot 5:17) names two kinds of conflict.

Machloket l'shem shamayim — a dispute for the sake of heaven. Both sides serve something larger than themselves. The classic example is the centuries-long disputes between the houses of Hillel and Shammai, two schools of rabbinical thought that disagreed on virtually everything. Their disputes endure in the Talmud to this day — not because one side won, but because the tension between them generated wisdom that neither position alone could produce.

Machloket she'eina l'shem shamayim — a dispute that is not for the sake of heaven. Positional. Ego-driven. The example is Korach's rebellion against Moses, a power grab dressed up as principle. These conflicts collapse, because they serve only one side's interests.

Without the cloud, the destructive cycle feels like Korach's rebellion. Two needs apparently fighting for dominance. Two actions locked in a stand-off. Pick one, sacrifice the other — that is how it looks from inside.

With the cloud, and with the cycle in view, the conflict becomes machloket l'shem shamayim. B and C stop appearing to compete. You see them for what they always were: two legitimate needs both serving A. The tension does not vanish, but it moves to where it actually belongs — between D and D', where it can be examined and dissolved. You can hold both needs with curiosity rather than anguish, because you know they point toward the same destination.

David's cycle without this clarity: scalability versus control. A fight he cannot win.

David's cycle with this clarity: scalability and control, both serving sustained leadership impact. A cycle worth interrupting — because interrupting it is what will move A back into reach.

Goldratt was a physicist, but he was also an Israeli steeped in Talmudic reasoning. The Evaporating Cloud did not emerge from nowhere. It is a structured method for creating the conditions where conflict can be held generatively — where both sides are honoured as serving something larger — until the assumptions that make them seem incompatible can be surfaced and challenged.

The Perry Approach takes this further. When we read the cloud back to the conflict and see the destructive cycle the compromises sustain, we are not just diagnosing. We are transforming the nature of the conflict itself. We are turning Korach into Hillel and Shammai. We are creating the conditions for machloket l'shem shamayim — dispute for the sake of something that matters.

Seeing the cycle is painful. The machloket principle is what lets the pain become useful. Clarity is the first step of change.

Practice: Surfacing the undesirable effects

Before you move on, take an hour with your cloud and do three things.

1. Ask the elicitation question. "When I feel pressure to have D, and I feel pressure to have D', what happens? How do I compromise?" Write down every compromise that surfaces. Push past the first three. The ones that arrive between the fifth and the eighth are usually the most revealing.
2. Sort the compromises across the three layers — direct, secondary, systemic — and notice where the cost is heaviest.
3. Look for the destructive cycle. How does each compromise let A recede further? How does A receding fuel more pressure on both D and D'?

If you can, do this with a thinking partner. The systemic layer is easier to see when someone who knows your work is in the room with you.

Closing

You can now see the cost of leaving your conflict in place and the cycle the unresolved structure quietly drives.

You have asked the question that surfaces the compromises the structure forces. You have sorted those compromises across the layers where they land. And you have seen that the compromises are not a static balance — they are a destructive cycle, eroding A even as they keep both sides partly fed.

If the structure feels heavier now than it did at the start of this chapter, that is not a sign something has gone wrong. It is a sign the method is doing what it is designed to do. Clouds feel most like prisons in the moment just before their logic is tested.

Between the last chapter and this one, we have now answered two of the most important questions in any change.

Why change? Because the destructive cycle is real, the cost is mounting, and A is receding.

What to change? The structure that locks D against D' — and the assumptions inside the arrows that make that structure feel like law.

In the next part of the book we work out the other two: what to change to, and how to do it.

The door was never locked. It has been held closed by assumptions you have not yet examined. In the next chapter, we begin to test them.

What's Next

In Chapter 11, you'll begin testing the arrows that hold the cloud in place — starting with the C–D' arrow, where the leverage almost always lives. The work surfaces the assumptions hidden inside each arrow and generates options that prove D' is not the only route to C. Everything you need is in the next chapter. You can work through it on your own, at your own pace.

Support for this step

Surfacing the UDEs — the compromises the unresolved cloud forces — is the moment the cost becomes visible. The elicitation question is simple; the honesty it requires is not. Most people stop at the third or fourth compromise, before the systemic layer reveals itself.

RIC — the Rapid Improvement Coach is an AI agent built specifically to support you through the process. RIC asks the elicitation question — When you feel pressure to have D, and pressure to have D', what happens? How do you compromise? — and stays with you until the compromises past the fifth and sixth emerge. You choose when the list is complete; RIC notices the destructive cycle and helps you see the cost the cloud is quietly extracting.

The Rising Above the Clouds course includes RIC, chapter assignments that coach you through each step with your own cloud, and weekly Conflict Club sessions where the method comes alive with real conflicts and real people.

Rising Above the Clouds - The Course

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