I don't know if Karl was born this way or somehow learned it, but he is — in my opinion — astonishingly clever about how people work.
This is mildly humbling for me, because I've spent years writing about people applying the Theory of Constraints. I march characters into impossible binds: the manager who can't say no, the expert nobody listens to, the team quietly drowning while insisting everything's fine. I do it on purpose — it's called a plot. But I'll let you in on a secret: most of them are stuck for exactly the reasons Karl spends his life helping real people get unstuck. Where I need three hundred pages to talk someone out of a corner, he tends to need about twenty minutes and the right questions. That is speed.
Because that's the thing Karl does. He takes Eli Goldratt's Theory of Constraints Thinking Processes — tools most people reserve for factories and gantt charts — and turns them on the messiest system of all: our selves. The bottlenecks we carry around inside our own heads. The conflicts that quietly run teams into the ground. The stuck patterns we can't find our way out of.
And here's the clever bit. Faced with a conflict, most of us reach for compromise — split the difference, everyone loses a little, we label it maturity. Karl refuses. He helps people dissolve the conflict instead: find what is holding you where you are, what you are actually protecting, prod the assumption holding it all together, and watch the whole impossible dilemma quietly evaporate. The first time you see it, it looks like a magic card trick. It isn't. It's method — and this book is that method, finally written down.
He's been doing this for individuals and organisations all over the world for years, through his High Performance through Engagement approach — helping them work out what to change, what to change to, and how to make it stick. And now he's put the whole thing in a book and given an online version away for free. I've spent my own career trying to make the Theory of Constraints accessible to ordinary people getting on with their work — and this book does exactly that. It's the method I've been applying in other areas, finally written down for the human system and handed to anyone who wants it. An extension of the very thing I've been trying to do, done beautifully. I couldn't be more pleased to see it.
So: if you're reading this book because something in your work or your life feels stuck and you can't quite see why — congratulations. You're in far better hands than most of my characters ever were. Karl is, literally, an astonishingly good thinking coach.
I'd tell you more, but I've got a novel to fix. One of my characters has got himself into a terrible mess, and I suspect I know exactly who he should call.
— Clarke Ching
Author of The Bottleneck Rules, Rolling Rocks Downhill, CorkScrew Solutions and Shaped for Speed