02:22 Hey, welcome back to another episode of the Growth and Scaling podcast. Today's guest all the way from South Africa and into our living room today is Dr. Alan Barnard. Dr. Alan, will you please tell us who you are and what does your business do to help other people? 

02:39 Thank you Todd. Thank you so much for the invitation. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Goldratt Research Labs. It's a company that I co-founded in 2009 with a Dr. Eli Goldratt. He's the creator of “Theory of Constraints" and author of multiple bestselling books. Probably the most famous one of all is called “The Goal”. It's a novel and uh, it's become one of the hundred and 50 most uh, highest selling books of all time. Um, And it basically,

03:12 You're kidding me. 

03:13 Yeah, it tells a story of a, you know, plant manager that arrives at the plant and he's being told that the plant is gonna be shut down within three months unless he can turn around. And it's about covering that journey, about how do you save something that's really precious to you. Uh, you're so frustrated and anxious because you need to get all the insights that you need, and you're just getting questions and not answers. Yes. 

03:39 That, that is fascinating. I, I, uh, sounds like a must read for most of our listeners today because everybody feels like they're in that same position, right? I've got three months of runway left. I I'm almost outta cash. Yeah. What am I gonna do to grow and scale the business to the next level, right? 

03:55 Yeah, well, Jeff, Jeff Bezos from Amazon, uh, has publicly stated that this is one of these three top books of all time he reads. I love it with his executive team every time they go on a big offsite, just to reinspire them because it just reminds you that, you know, it doesn't matter how complex your system is. There's always one thing, right? Which is in, in the case of share of construction, what's that one thing that's limiting my business? Where's the weakest link or the bottleneck? Because if I can't solve that problem, nothing else matters. 

04:24 Right. Right. So, so this is fascinating. Um, so as you, as you talk about this story and the impact that Dr. Goldratt had on, on this, the whole world of constraint and theory of constraint and all the things that you guys have done in your studies, tell us about, uh, who your real clients are. Who are you actually helping out there? Is this, is this just a general push to flood the earth with good information? Or are you specifically targeting certain people to help them in their business? 

04:58 The, the people that we are massively passionate about serving are people that need and want to make better, faster decisions when it really, really matters. So we have a part of my company that focuses on the, the business aspect, working with for profit and also for purpose organizations. And then we also have a foundation where we are working with individuals. So if you think about your life. You know, um, being a decision scientist, we, we make about 35,000 decisions every day. Most of that is happening in the subconscious mind, in our fully automatic mode right? Um, the good news is because it can be kind of overwhelming to think about that, but the good news is most of those decisions in the bigger scheme of things doesn't matter at all. You know, what I'm eating, what I'm wearing, how I'm getting to work or to school, etcetera. But there are few decisions that really, really matters, and that's the part that we focus on is, is trying to understand why good people, make and often repeat bad decisions that could have been avoided. And based on that research, we've developed a whole series of decision support methods and apps to help people and organizations make better, faster decisions when it really, really matters. So that's what myself and my team, when we wake up in the morning, those are the people that we are passionate to serve as people that are facing decisions that are so difficult. Sometimes we, we even call them impossible decisions. 

06:35 Wow! I love it. And, and I, I'm fascinated by the book, I'm fascinated by the, the concept of your business in general. Um, tell us about that, implementing that kind of process in a business versus an individual. Well, let's kind of dissect each one because I think these are two very different problems. How do you solve it in an individual? And then let's talk about in a business, because that, this is really fascinating.

07:03 So firstly, I'll, I'll give just a brief overview for anybody that's not familiar with Theory of Constraints. So we call something, a theory in science when it's going to give us information about why something is useful and important. So if you think about the theory of relativity, you expect when somebody explains that theory to you, why is relativity important and useful? So the idea of a constraint, is very useful and important when it makes the decisions about where to focus. So the, the methodology guides you through what we call the five focusing steps.  It says, number one decision you have to make, whether you are in business or in life, is to decide what your goal is. Why? Because the goal will determine what resources you need, and how much of these resources that you need. Then you say, okay, once I've decided on my goal, then step one will be identify the constraint, the weakest link, the bottleneck, the one thing that you don't have enough of to achieve that goal. So whether I'm in a for-profit or for-purpose business business, the first constraint could be, do I have enough clients to serve? To achieve my impact or income goal, right? If I don't guess, what's the one thing to focus on? Get enough clients, right? The other possibilities could be, do I have enough capacity? Do I have enough supply? Do I have enough cash? But there's also a thing that links it back to the individuals. There's, do I have enough attention? Attention is the ultimate constraint for ourselves. And for management, especially top management, as if you think about the number of things that demand your attention will always exceed your available attention. So once you've got that idea, so that is step one, is identify the constraint as an individual. It's mostly, it's, uh, limited attention, right? But it's also can be true for a business owner. It's their limited attention that will govern the rate at which they can grow their business or scale their business or improve their business or change their business. Step two says, okay, now that you know where the constraint is, is it the market? Yeah. Capacity, supply, cash, or attention. Decide how to exploit and not waste it, right? So the little bit that you have, make sure you don't waste it. So if it's our limited attention, the first thing to do, identify all the things that we waste our attention on, right? Dealing with unimportant things, social media, all of that things, stop doing that because immediately it'll increase the level of attention that you have available. So that's normally part of that. Step two, decide out to better exploit or not waste. The scale, resource, or constraint is decide what to stop doing, right?  Step number three says, okay, now that you've made that decision, subordinate everything to it. Go and have a look right at any performance metric that you have in place. Any policy or behavior that's in conflict with this decision to better exploit and not waste it and change only that. Step four says, well, That will get your, your constraint performance up. And as you're, as you're making the weakest link stronger, your business becomes stronger. So that's the correlation. It's the only part where there's a one-to-one relationship. You make any other link stronger, the business doesn't get stronger, right? But you, you strengthen the weakest link immediately, the amount of gold units that it can produce goes up. So it says, look, by better exploiting what you've got, you can get up to a point. But if that's still not enough, To achieve the goal, then now go and elevate the constraint. Go and get more. Hire additional salespeople. Go and add new products or go into a new market. But don't do that before you've exploited first what you've got. And then the last question, step five says, If you've hit a constraint, right, you, you've, you've broken a constraint through the first four steps. Don't let in inertia become the constraint. Go back to step one, and that gives you your continuous process of ongoing improvement. So going back to your question, how does it apply to us as individuals? Our limited attention is our constraint. Make sure you don't waste it on things and people that are not helping you get closer to your goal and subordinate everything to that. And then if it's not enough, then go and elevate, you know, and you can elevate them two ways. Today I can hire additional people to help me or I can use AI like chatGPT to amplify dramatically my limited attention and get me to do a lot more things much, much faster than with much better quality. 

12:02 You know, the whole time you were explaining all of that, I, uh, I was totally distracted thinking about. How this all applies to me and my business. I'm grateful you, you kept it going because I, I got lost in thought. And my guess is a lot of the people listening to this were, were probably going down the same mental path that I just went through, which is thinking about all the things that are distracting me, thinking about how many things I need to, I need to, to, uh, distribute amongst my team that I'm taking on myself that I probably shouldn't be doing. And, and I think these are huge, huge issues. With almost anyone on a personal level, but especially the audience in mind here of those trying to grow a scale business. Because how often do you see, when you run into a new business client and you're trying to help them operationally achieve higher threshold? What? What are the most common issues you see when you jump in to try and help 'em? 

13:00 Well, the, the, the most common thing is making the mistake of saying, I don't have enough of this resource. Let go, let me go and get more of it, right? When you already have enough, you're just not using it properly. Uh, Tony Robbins, uh, talks about it's, it's not lack of resources, it's a lack of resourcefulness. And I really love that because it tells us that whatever your constraint is at the moment, whether it's the market or capacity or supply or cash or limited attention, your first focus should be, how do I not waste what I have? How, how am I wasting it? By focusing on things and people that are not important, that doesn't matter. That's not helping me make progress towards the meaningful goals that I've set to myself. 

15:15 This is fascinating. Um, and, and, and I love, I love the way that you've pieced this together in a five step process. I love, you know, processes always help people digest the information in a way that, that they can actually feel like they can go out and do it. Tell us, take a step back now though. Now that we know what your business does, who you trying to help and how you help them, let's talk about your actual business. Your model is designed around helping organizations to become better, quicker decision makers, how to be more efficient with their time, their resources and all these things. Tell us about and, and as you evolved, I know there were some life challenges in there. I know there were some things that happened that were amazing. Growth trajectory boosters. Let's talk about the positive first. What are some of the highlights of your growth journey so far, and where do you think it's taking you right now?

16:13 Well, some of the highlights have been, you know, even though we are a relatively small company, I, I have a team of about, uh, 12, 15 people or so. We've been able to work with some of the most incredible organizations around the world. So we did a project with Microsoft where we applied Theory of Constraints. To help them identify where in their supply chain they making decisions that are causing avoidable shortages and surpluses. At the retailers and distribution centers. And within the same year that we started with that project where we had three of our people on it just free, right. Working with Microsoft, um, they reduced their inventories by over a quarter of a billion dollars and got sell up by a few hundred million. Right? And it's just, it's small changes. Yeah, that can have big, big impacts. I've worked with a comp, the largest private company in the World Cargo, right? It's an agricultural company that's, you know, producing, for example, all the chickens that goes into chicken nuggets for McDonald's and. We've worked with, uh, companies like Sile in India with a United Nations World Food Program. So, that has been some of the highlights. But then on the other scale of things is being able to work with, with schools and, you know, even in suicide prevention Center where you realize it all comes back to that decision. You know, if you, if you had to ask me, I was once asked in an interview. So, Alan, if you wanna help people improve their decisions, what's the worst possible decision that you could make? And you know, it, it kind of took me back a little bit cause I realized, it's probably the decision to take somebody else's life or your own life. That's probably the worst decision. And as I said that, I'm going like, okay, if you really serious about this goal of yours, Like how are you helping those people? And it was incredible because almost kind of coincidentally just a few days later, I was contacted by a suicide prevention center that found. My app, the harmony decision maker on the app store. And they found out that actually somebody that is reaching the point where they're feeling hopeless and helpless, which is one of those tic points where it can get even a, a generally happy person to become kind of suicidal. Just by following the process in my app, it slows down your thinking. And it gets you out of that automatic mode because what happens in all decisions, but specifically that type of decision. We don't objectively look at reality and then we decide. What we do is we decide and then we look, look at reality through these filters of our decisions. So when you decide, wow, that the world. Is hopeless and helpless, right, that you are hopeless and helpless, all that your mind goes for evidence to support that decision. And of course, because you're looking for it, it'll find it. So by slowing down your thinking and using something like an app that forces you to look at the positives and minuses of all the options that you have, right, can get you out of that cycle. So, so that to me is, is my real passion. Um, amazing. That's been some of the positive, both working with these incredible large organizations and, and realizing that even with a small team, you can add tremendous value to them. And then that it's amazing all the way down to working with an old kid, you know, or teacher at school and, and being able to help them as well.

20:02 It's amazing that that is definitely highlighted. I, I, I applaud you for that. That's very, very cool. Now, and how do you, um, Let's flip to the other side. What, what's been your biggest challenge in your growth journey? I mean, it sounds like you've developed apps to try and reach more people. It sounds like you've, you've had some breakthroughs. What are the things that, that kind of drove some of that growth through the negative? 

20:25 Well, first, let you know, probably the most dramatic moment that still haunts me and inspires me every day. You know, I started a company co-founder with Dr. Eli Goldratt in 2009. He was, he was diagnosed with a stage four cancer and passed away tragically in 2011. And, uh, yeah, he, he basically, the last words he spoke to me was, he said to me, Alan, do not dare stand in my shadow. Stand on my shoulders. And he reconfirmed the message that he gave to me. The first time we met. We were talking about life goals and how important it's to have a life goal, right? And he reminded me that a life goal is, is is only or simply a dream taken seriously. You know, it takes courage to have dreams. But it even takes more courage to take them seriously because from the moment you, you have that clear dream in mind, for example, who do I really wanna serve? You start evaluating everything according to that, right? So that's, that's, but like I said, it was both traumatic because when you, anybody that's lost somebody that's so close to you, you know, it's dramatic. Um, But it's, it's, it's kind of interesting because he reminded me of this, uh, um, saying in Nanny Mcphee, this movie about this person that looks after these kids, naughty kids, and you know, the, the saying was something like, “When you need me, but do not want me, I will stay. When you want me, but no longer need me, I will go”. And it was kind of, when you are losing somebody like that, you realize, right, maybe this is the moment where I still want them, but I don't, I no longer need them. I've learned enough. You know, I can now stand on their shoulders and, and move forward. So getting back to your question about some of the growth challenges, my goal has always been impact related, not income related and you realize you need a minimum level of income to maintain a good quality of life for yourself and for your team and family. But the goal has always been, uh, related to income, uh, sorry, related to impact and right. We built this business. We started working with these incredible companies and people, and then we hit basically a constraint. Say, okay, there's only so many projects, so many people that you can work with individually. How do I now grow further? And we realize that there was really just two ways. The one was turning everything that we've done into apps. And the second, the second part is when you find an organization that you believe could get most value from your knowledge and technology. Partner with them, maybe on a percentage profit share or percentage equity. So identify those companies almost like you would in a startup. Right? It's very common in the startup world. Where I can't afford a CFO, but I need one, and I offer equity and return, so we realize that there are some companies. So those, those, that's gonna be my two ways of really scaling the business, is we've created a whole series of apps that, uh, um, you know, can be made available on a sa basis, software as a service basis for small fee every month. And there it's all about volume. And then the other basis is some of those app users will need more help. And then we can identify if they need a significant amount of help, not just we can charge for consulting, but maybe they'd be open to a, a equity partnership. 

24:31 I love it. And you know that that's not a bad way to operate a business. I, I've, uh, I've been doing that with some of my clients for sure. On a, on a revops where we, we, a lot of our fee is associated with our performance and, and a performance based models totally work. But, uh, you know, so as you, as you meet other groups who are in that conundrum, I love that you, you took all the experience and all the things that you could do on an individual basis with your focused energy and turn them into apps so that it could be more widely distributed. And reach a bigger impact. I, I think that that's fascinating and I think that you took lemons and made lemonade. I mean, you took the challenge of being able to implement this with lots of people and the, the it is a challenge to implement what you're talking about with a lot of people and, and simplify it down into something that everyone can download. Great pivot. Fantastic pivot. How is that help you grow? 

25:31 Um, I can tell you in, in two ways the, the one is the success rate, right? I was recently, um, interviewed, uh, for a documentary that's being made around addiction. Uh, Joe Polish, who runs this incredible genius network, he's actually producing this and they were asking me about what are the inconsistencies I see within addiction? And you say, well, the gold standard in addiction treatment is called a 12 step program. And clinics that facilitate this program claim a success rate of 50%. Right. But the researchers that has done meta research on groups that have gone through these programs claim a, a, a success rate of only 5%. And the question, how can it be, there's this major inconsistency, right? Which is, yeah, and it turns out that the clinics suffer from something called compliance bias. They measure their success rate based on a number of people that actually completed the program. So a hundred percent, a hundred people completed 50 sober. The real number is how many people started the program? It was a thousand. So that 50 is really just 5%. Makes so, makes sense. What we sense are doing when you're trying to operationalize things, you're trying to define the process, right? Yeah. So just by defining the steps, you are already getting a benefit, but there's something profound about simplicity. So, the way I explain this as to say, what do you think the success rate of a program will be? It's, there's 12 steps in it, and over the last 70, 80 years, they've perfected each step to be 80% successful. What would be the success rate of the program? Well, it would be 80% times, 80% times 80%, 12 times the most, the best success rate that you can theoretically get is 5%. Think about that, right. Compared to if I had only three steps, I actually took the time and said, of these 12 steps, are all of them actually necessary? Right? Right. And when you speak to people that have gone through the program and you find out from them what do they believe, help them, right? It's never more than three things, right? So suddenly with the same success rate, Of 80% per step, you can get to a free step program that delivers true 50% success rate, right? From people that start that program. And that's kind of what we are doing in our research lab. Once you, once you pick up a decision that has to be made, you think about what's the steps that you have to go through, how can I reduce dramatically the number of steps? And they focus everything on those steps and see how can I keep the probability of success rate of each step up so I can get the probability of success of the overall outcome up dramatically. 

23:39  Love it. I love it. Well, this has been inspiring and it's got my head going a million different directions. Uh, I don't know how you can do this all day long. And, and still keep your head straight cuz this is like throwing me for a loop. I love this information. It's fascinating and, and I cannot wait to read the book. I cannot wait to download some of these apps because this really does help people make quicker decisions, make the decisions that matter most the right way because they predetermined answers and they've got, they, they're kind of trained themselves to make the right decisions at the right times. Who has inspired you? I, I, I'd love to get a shout out near the end of the interviews here to keep the business moving the direction it initially intended to, and, and to take it to where it's at today. 

29:27 Well, the most obvious one is of course, my mentor, Dr. Eli Goldratt, that I co-founder of the business with. Like I said, you know, these words inspire and haunt me every day. You know, don't stand in my shadow, stand in my shoulders. And are you taking your dream seriously? Um, but there's a couple of others. I, I remember one of the quotes that have really had a dramatic impact on my life, um, is a quote by Jean Baptista as a French physicist.  And he said that the aim of all science is to substitute visible complexity for invisible simplicity. So if you think about E equal to mc squared, it's a really simple mathematical correlation, but it explains so much of the visible complexity in the universe, and that's what inspires me about decision making. There's a lot of visible complexity out there, but there's this profound inherent but invisible simplicity. And by trying to codify the process that you can follow to make better, faster decisions when it really matters. That's what's driving me towards, you know, achieving my own goal of helping more and more people.

30:38 Love it. I love it. Thank you. Thank you so much for your time today. I, I honestly, I love it. I feel like we could go on for an hour, uh, a couple hours talking about this and I'm sure you do it on a regular basis. So I'm gonna hold us to this time cause. I, I don't, I want people to follow up with you afterwards. Where, where's a good place for them to get a taste of what you have to teach? And are you available on other social media channels? Where do people find you? 

31:06 Yeah, my, uh, social media handle is Dr. Alan Barnard. Um, so Dr. Alan Barnard. And they can find me on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on Instagram, on Twitter, on TikTok. Um, I also have a channel on YouTube, uh, Dr. Alan Barnard. I have a website, dralanbarnard.com. But for those that are interested in our range of apps, they can go to harmonyapps.com. That will be the place. So we have a harmony decision maker app that's available for free on all the app stores that they can download and immediately start experiencing, uh, how to follow a simple process to make you help you make those really, really hard decisions in life or in business.

31:48 I love it. I'm gonna download it as soon as we're done and I, and I'll put links to everything down below and the show notes. Thanks for being here so much today and we'll look forward to catching up with you later. Thanks so much, doctor. 

32:00 Thank you, Todd.