The Warp and the Weft
Innovate–Educate–Collaborate, See–Judge–Act, and the Thinking Processes of Eliyahu Goldratt: Think Thomas Merton
I wrote this in response to several emails I received about last Monday’s blog post addressing data centers. People asked if I could explain the methodology a tad more, especially regarding Goldratt and See-Judge-Act. So here it is, and I added a section explaining why this is most important when we study Thomas Merton.
I. A mantra that was already speaking Goldratt
In February 2024, I wrote that “Innovate, Educate, Collaborate,” woven together with See–Judge–Act, makes a seamless garment of change. Rereading that piece now, I notice something I did not notice while writing it.
I warned that unverbalized fear is the fastest way to kill positive change. I said that understanding cause and effect is critical to our growth. I closed by describing the mantra as a process of ongoing improvement.
Those three phrases are not mine. They are Eliyahu Goldratt’s ~ an Israeli physicist turned business theorist who, so far as I know, never read a word of Cardijn. Still, he did hear of Thomas Merton from me, just saying, and who would probably have been amused to find himself in a Catholic Social Teaching newsletter. Unverbalized fear is the sixth and deepest of his layers of resistance to change. Cause and effect is the entire grammar of his Current Reality Tree. Process of ongoing improvement ~ POOGI to his practitioners ~ is the name he gave to the refusal of any final state.
The vocabulary had already arrived. What follows is an attempt to bring the rest of the man with it, and to ask what he adds to a method that has been working perfectly well for a hundred years without him.
The short answer is: he adds rigor where the method most often goes soft. And he cannot supply the one thing without which his rigor is dangerous.
II. The same enemy
Start with what they were against, because that is where the kinship is clearest.
Cardijn’s young workers in Laeken were not being lost to the Church by argument. They were being lost by conditions, and by what conditions do to a person’s sense of the possible. A boy of fourteen went into a factory and learned, within a year, that this was how it was for people like him. That fatalism ~ not atheism, not Marx ~ was the disease Cardijn set out to cure. The whole apparatus of the inquiry, the cell, the review of life, exists to break the conviction that reality is fixed.
Goldratt’s plant managers had the same disease in a suit. The market is what it is. The union will never accept it. Head office won’t approve it. You can’t have low inventory and high service levels; pick one. He titled a book It’s Not Luck precisely to say: your results are caused, and causes can be found, and what can be found can be changed. He called the belief that things are complicated the great alibi.
Both men were fighting the same lie in two dialects. If that seems a thin basis for weaving them together, notice that it is the only basis on which any method of change can begin. You cannot teach See–Judge–Act to someone who believes there is nothing to be done. You cannot innovate, educate or collaborate your way out of a situation you have accepted as given.
III. The near-identity
Goldratt organized his Thinking Processes around three questions:
What to change? What to change to? How to cause the change?
Set them beside See, Judge, Act, and the correspondence is almost embarrassing.
I want to resist making too much of this too quickly, because a tidy table is exactly the kind of thing that lets a practitioner stop thinking. The correspondence is real, but the two triads are not doing identical work, and the places where they diverge are more useful than the places where they line up.
Where does Innovate–Educate–Collaborate sit in this? Not as a fourth column. The mantra was never a sequence — I said in 2024 that innovation requires knowledge, that education thrives on collaboration, that collaboration fuels innovation. That is a loop, not a line. The three words are better understood as the dispositions that make each of Cardijn’s three moments actually happen. Educate is what See requires of us. Innovate is what Judge produces when it is done honestly. Collaborate is the only form in which Act is real. TaAct them one at a time.
IV. See, and Educate: the inquiry and the tree
The See step fails predictably. A group gathers, names what is wrong, and produces a list. Housing is unaffordable. Young people are leaving the parish. Wages are stagnant. Nobody comes to meetings. The list grows, everyone feels the weight of it, and then somebody proposes a solution to whichever item was named most loudly.
Goldratt’s name for the items on that list is undesirable effects, and his central methodological claim is that they are not a list at all. They are the visible tips of a small number of causes — often one. His Current Reality Tree is the discipline of connecting the effects by verified cause-and-effect arrows until the structure resolves into a core problem, usually something nobody had named, and usually something the group is itself doing.
This rests on the first of the four pillars he set out in The Choice: inherent simplicity. Any real-life situation, however complex it looks, is once understood embarrassingly simple. He borrowed the conviction from Newton — natura valde simplex est et sibi consona, nature is exceedingly simple and conformable to herself — and he meant it as a working assumption, not a metaphysics. Complexity is a measure of our ignorance of the system, not a property of it.
Cardijn’s inquiry was reaching for the same thing without the diagram. The point of the inquiry was never to catalog grievances. It was to get the young worker to trace a fact back to its cause, then that cause to its cause, until he arrived somewhere he could actually stand and push—facts first, then connections, then the thing beneath the facts.
And here is why Educate belongs to this step rather than to some separate stage of instruction. Neither man will let you hand the answer over. Goldratt’s rule for building a tree with a client was that you never tell them the core problem; you ask questions until they say it themselves, because a conclusion someone reaches is a conclusion they will act on, and a conclusion they are given is one they will discuss. Cardijn’s version is the whole architecture of the JOC: by the worker, for the worker, with the worker. He did not send educated men to explain the situation to workers. He formed workers who would do the seeing themselves. Subsidiarity is not a nicety here. It is the mechanism.
So the Current Reality Tree is not an analytical instrument that happens to be built in a group. It is a teaching instrument that happens to produce an analysis. That is exactly what the inquiry was. Education, in this method, is not preparation for seeing. It is seeing, done together, out loud. ( This is key and very important)
One practical rule follows, and it is the hardest one to enforce: no solutions in the room during See. The moment a proposal is on the table, the group stops looking and starts defending. Cardijn’s cells knew this instinctively. Most parish and community meetings I have sat in violate it within four minutes. Just stop!
V. Judge, and Innovate: the cloud
Judge is where the method most often collapses, in one of two directions. Either it becomes verdict — we look at the situation, we condemn it, we feel righteous, nothing moves. Or it becomes citation — we produce the relevant paragraph of Rerum Novarum or Laudato Si’, agree that it is excellent, and adjourn.
Goldratt’s contribution here is the single most useful thing he built, and I think it is the one a Cardijn practitioner should learn first. He called it the Evaporating Cloud.
The structure is simple. Take the conflict at the heart of the core problem. Name the two actions in tension. Name the requirement each action is meant to satisfy. Then name the objective that both requirements serve — because if the two sides did not share an objective, there would be no dilemma, only a fight. You now have a diagram with an apex and two arms, and beneath every arrow sits an assumption.
The second pillar of The Choice is that every conflict can be removed—not compromised. Goldratt claims that a genuine conflict between two necessary conditions of a single objective cannot exist in reality; if it appears to, one of the assumptions holding the arrows in place is false. Find the false assumption, name it, and the cloud evaporates. What replaces it he called an injection: the new element that makes the dilemma dissolve rather than be split.
That injection is what I have been calling Innovate.
I want to be precise about this, because it changes what innovation means in the mantra. Innovation is not the brainstorm. It is not thinking outside the box, a phrase I have used myself and now regret. Innovation, in this method, is the specific and disciplined Act of locating a false assumption under an apparent necessity, and it can only happen inside a well-formed judgment. Proper judgment is where innovation is born. They are not two steps. Judgment is the labor; innovation is what is delivered.
Cardijn did exactly this and had no diagram for it. The conflict of his day was presented as ontological: the interests of capital and the interests of labor are opposed, and you must choose a side. The liberals resolved it by denying the workers’ arm. The Marxists resolved it by denying the owners’. Cardijn refused the frame. He put at the apex something neither side had put there — the dignity of the worker as a son or daughter of God, worth more, as he liked to say, than all the gold in the world — and from that apex the conflict looked different. Not resolved by compromise and dissolved, because the assumption that a man’s worth is a function of his output turned out to be false.
That is an evaporating cloud, drawn forty years before Goldratt drew one.
It also explains a phrase I have used for years without fully unpacking it: that we do not solve our problems, we outgrow them. Jung said it first. Goldratt gave it a procedure. A problem that is outgrown is not a problem that was solved on its own terms; it is a problem that stopped existing when the assumption sustaining it died.
Two disciplines keep this honest. First, the Future Reality Tree: having found an injection, map forward and check that it actually produces the effects you want. Second — and this is the one practitioners skip — the Negative Branch Reservation: map forward and look for the harm your good idea will cause. Every serious social intervention has a negative branch. The Judge step in Catholic Social Teaching has a proper name for the discipline of looking for the damage in what you intend: it is called examination of conscience, and it belongs in the planning meeting as much as in the confessional.
VI. Act, and Collaborate: the layers of resistance
The Act step fails when a good decision meets people who were not part of making it.
Goldratt mapped this with unusual patience. He identified six layers of resistance, and the discipline is that they must be worked in order, because an objection at layer four cannot be answered with an argument aimed at layer one:
We do not agree on what the problem is.
We do not agree on the direction of the solution.
We do not agree that your solution actually solves the problem.
Yes, but your solution will cause new problems.
Yes, but there are obstacles in the way of doing it.
Unverbalized fear.
Read that list as a description of a well-run cell meeting, and it reads perfectly. Read it as a description of most attempts at change, and it explains the failures. We arrive at layer two with our solution and are met with a layer-one disagreement, so we repeat the solution more loudly. Someone raises a negative branch at layer four, and we hear obstruction rather than a contribution. And layer six — the vague unease of a person about to do something entirely new, which turns to anxiety, then denial, then rejection — is never spoken, because nobody made a room in which it could be.
The reframe Goldratt offers is worth stating flatly: resistance is information. An objection at layer four is a free negative branch analysis. An objection at layer five is a free prerequisite tree. The person raising it is doing your work for you.
That reframe is only available if you already believe something about the objector, which brings us to the third pillar of The Choice: people are good. Goldratt meant it as an operating rule, not a sentiment. When someone behaves badly in a system, do not look at their character; look at what the system is measuring them on. Please tell me how you measure me, and I will tell you how I will behave. Blame is not merely uncharitable; it is analytically lazy, because it terminates the inquiry at the exact point where it should continue into the structure.
Cardijn is saying the same thing in a different register when he insists that the young workers of Belgium were not being de-Christianised by wickedness but by conditions. Catholic Social Teaching has a term for what Goldratt is pointing at — structures of sin — and the convergence is close enough to be startling. Both men locate the fault in the arrangement rather than the soul, and both do so not to excuse anyone but because that is where the leverage is.
This is what Collaborate actually means here, and it is more demanding than “working together.” It means that the people affected build the tree, name the conflict, and raise the objections; that their resistance is treated as data rather than as friction; and that power and ownership are genuinely shared, because a change that people did not help design is a change they will have to be managed into. That is subsidiarity, and it is also just good engineering.
VII. Never say “I know”
The fourth pillar of The Choice is a discipline against ourselves: never say “I know.” Goldratt’s five focusing steps end with an instruction that has always struck me as the most spiritually serious sentence in his work — go back to step one, and do not let inertia become the constraint. The system you improved has changed. Your analysis is now out of date. Begin again.
Cardijn built the same refusal into the method and called it the review of life. Act, and then come back and see again. Not evaluation as an audit function, but as the reopening of the cycle. Neither method has a terminal state. Neither offers the satisfaction of arrival.
This matters more than it looks. A method with an end state becomes an ideology, and both of these methods were built by men who had watched ideologies eat movements. The review of life and the process of ongoing improvement are the same structural safeguard: an insistence that the last answer is provisional and the next inquiry is already due.
VIII. The seam that will not close
Now the difficulty, and I do not think it should be smoothed over, because a practitioner who misses it will do damage.
Goldratt’s method requires a goal. Every Current Reality Tree is built against a goal — an undesirable effect is only undesirable relative to something you are trying to achieve. Every cloud has an objective at its apex. And Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints does not, and cannot, generate that goal. It takes it from the owner of the system. For the firms he consulted to, the goal was stipulated: to make money now and in the future. Everything else — throughput, inventory, operating expense — was defined in relation to it.
This is the source of both the method’s power and its danger. The Thinking Processes will optimize whatever goal you feed them, with the same elegance and the same force. Feed them a goal that treats persons as inputs, and you will get a beautifully reasoned tree that arrives, by valid steps, somewhere monstrous. There is nothing inside the method that objects.
Cardijn’s Judge step is precisely the thing Goldratt does not have. In See–Judge–Act, Judge is not “what to change to.” Judge is the moment at which the goal itself is put under scrutiny — held up against the Gospel, the natural law, the dignity of the person — and that criterion is received, not chosen. It comes from outside the system. It is not available for optimization. This is why the Judge step cannot be replaced by a cloud, only sharpened by one.
So the honest account is not that the two methods are the same thing in different words. It is this: Goldratt supplies the rigor that Cardijn’s method needs and lacks. Cardijn supplies the goal that Goldratt’s method needs and cannot produce. They are not rivals, and they are not duplicates. They are load-bearing in different directions.
There is a second limit worth naming. Goldratt’s world is one in which all suffering is a system defect awaiting a correct diagnosis. There is no room in a Current Reality Tree for the young worker whose life cannot be optimized, for irreducible loss, for the cross. A Cardijn cell had to sit with people in that condition, and the method held because it was never only a method. Anyone importing the Thinking Processes into pastoral or community work should know that they will carry a great deal and then, at a certain point, carry nothing at all.
IX. The seer: why this matters when you read Merton
There is a hole in Goldratt’s system that he never seems to have noticed. Somebody builds every Current Reality Tree. Every list of undesirable effects is a list of the things that struck this group of people as undesirable. The four pillars discipline the analysis; nothing in them disciplines the analyst. Goldratt assumes an honest observer and moves on.
Merton’s entire life’s work is the claim that there is no honest observer by default.
The false self, in Merton’s account, is not merely a spiritual liability. It is a perceptual one. A person living from the self he has constructed to secure others’ approval cannot see other people; he can only see how they confirm or threaten the construction. Run that through this method, and the consequence is severe. If I build a Current Reality Tree from the false self, my undesirable effects will be the things that threaten my standing, my core problem will be reliably located in somebody else, and the tree will be logically impeccable and completely wrong. The instrument was never calibrated.
This is why Merton belongs in the weave, and it is why the process matters when we study him rather than merely admire him.
Merton’s own tree. Notice first that his central claim is structurally identical to Goldratt’s first pillar. Merton does not offer a list of social ills. He argues that a very large number of undesirable effects — racism, the logic of deterrence, the violence latent in consumer society, the emptiness that makes totalitarianism possible — trace back through cause and effect to one thing: societies of false selves build structures that serve the false self’s agenda. That is a Current Reality Tree with a single entity at its root. It is inherent simplicity applied to the soul. Catholic Social Teaching has a name for the middle of that tree — structures of sin. Merton is telling us where the tree is rooted.
Notice second what he does to the Judge step. You cannot build a just society with unjust souls is not a devotional sentiment. It is a negative branch reservation on every purely structural injection ever proposed. The activist who has not confronted his own will to dominate will reproduce inside his own organization the injustice he set out to remove. Merton is instructing us to map that branch before we act, every time. Most reform movements find it only in the wreckage.
Three ways of reading Merton badly, and what the process does about each.
Merton as anthology. He is the most quotable spiritual writer of the century, which is a hazard rather than a gift. The corpus is enormous; it spans thirty years, and it is heavily mediated — by his censors, by his own revisions, and by the fact that the journals were withheld from publication for twenty-five years after his death. In 1962 the Abbot General forbade him to publish on war; Peace in the Post-Christian Era went out instead as six hundred mimeographed copies marked “not for publication,” and did not appear properly until 2004. To quote Merton flat, without date or circumstance, is therefore a category error, and it is precisely what the See step forbids. Facts first: what did he write, when, under what constraint, and what had already happened to him by then? The Merton of The Seven Story Mountain in 1948 and the Merton of 1966 are not the same man, and that difference is the material, not an embarrassment to be smoothed over.
Merton as contradiction. Students who do notice the difference often conclude that he is unreliable — that he kept changing his mind, that he wanted the hermitage and the world at once. Read the corpus as an evaporating cloud, and it resolves. The conflict is stated plainly enough: to be faithful he must withdraw; to be faithful he must engage. Both arms serve one objective, and everyone around him — his abbot, his censors, his readers, his own early writing — pressed him to compromise, to take a percentage of each. He refused the split and spent decades hunting the false assumption underneath it. The injection, when it came, was that contemplation is not the alternative to engagement but the condition of seeing anything worth engaging. Fourth and Walnut is the moment the cloud evaporates. That is not a man contradicting himself. That is a man doing the Judge step slowly, in public, over thirty years — and a student with the diagram in hand can follow the work instead of scoring the inconsistencies.
Merton as consolation. This is the serious one. Merton is a pleasure to read, and reading him produces a sensation of depth that is easily mistaken for the thing itself. The accumulation of contemplative vocabulary is one of the more sophisticated projects the false self can undertake, and Merton would have said so about his readers, having said harder things about himself. Nothing internal to the reading protects against this. The process does: Merton studied in company rather than alone, judged against the dignity of actual people rather than against our taste for him, acted upon, and then reviewed. Read privately, he becomes an aesthetic. Read inside See–Judge–Act, he does what he was for.
Never say “I know.” Goldratt’s fourth pillar is a discipline against the certainty that terminates inquiry. Merton wrote the prayer version of it: I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. An engineer and a monk arriving from opposite directions at the same refusal. In Goldratt it protects the analysis; in Merton it protects the analyst. A study group that can say that sentence honestly about its own conclusions has the only qualification that finally matters.
So the account in the previous section needs a third clause. Goldratt supplies the rigor that Cardijn’s method needs and lacks. Cardijn supplies the goal that Goldratt’s method needs and cannot produce. Merton supplies the seer — the sustained work on the observer without which the rigor is merely efficient and the goal merely stated—rigor, goal, and the person holding the instrument. Remove any one and the remaining two will eventually produce something worse than nothing, because they will produce it competently.
X. A working cycle
For those who want to run this rather than read about it. One loop, three movements, and the mantra as the disposition each movement demands.
SEE — the disposition is Educate. Before a single fact goes on the wall, ask each person aloud what they need out of this for their own standing, and write the answers down; the false self does its work early and in silence. Then gather the people actually affected ~nobody analyses on their behalf. Collect facts, not opinions ~ what happened, to whom, how often. Write each undesirable effect on its own card. Then connect them with cause-and-effect arrows, reading each aloud as “if this, then that,” and keep going until several arrows converge on something nobody had named. That is your core problem. Enforce one rule without exception: no solutions in this room. Expect this to take longer than you planned and to be the reason everything afterward works.
JUDGE — the disposition is Innovate. Find the conflict inside the core problem. Draw the cloud: two actions, the requirement behind each, the shared objective above both. Then state, out loud, the assumption under every arrow. Ask of each: is this actually true, or have we never questioned it? Before you settle the apex, submit the objective itself to the tradition — is this what human dignity requires, or only what our interests require? Then look for the injection that makes the conflict disappear rather than the compromise that splits it. Map the future forward, and hunt deliberately for the negative branch. If you cannot find any harm in your own proposal, you have not looked.
ACT — the disposition is Collaborate. List the obstacles honestly and turn each into an intermediate objective; the sequence of those objectives is your plan. Then work the six layers in order with the people who must live with it, and treat every objection as a contribution to the design. Watch for layer six, which will not announce itself: make a room in which someone can say “I am afraid of this” without losing face. Start small, and let an early visible success do the arguing.
Then return. Review honestly, in company, against what you actually said you would achieve. The situation has changed and so has your understanding of it. Do not let inertia become the constraint. Go back to See.
XI. Woven from the top throughout
The garment in John’s Gospel is described with an odd precision: the tunic was seamless, woven from the top throughout, and the soldiers would not tear it. Cardinal Bernardin later took the image for the consistent ethic of life, and I have taken it for this weave, perhaps too easily.
It is worth noticing what actually makes such a garment seamless. Not that the threads are identical ~ they plainly are not. A Belgian priest who buried his father after an industrial accident and an Israeli physicist who taught factory managers to think are not the same kind of thread and were not spun for the same purpose. What makes the garment whole is that it is woven from a single point of origin, and that one set of threads runs the entire length.
That is the warp, and in this weave the warp is one thing only: the conviction that the person in front of you has a dignity that is received rather than earned, that is not a function of output, and that is not available for trade. Cardijn spent his life laying that thread. Merton spent his life warning that we cannot see it with the eyes we currently have. Everything else ~ the inquiry, the cell, the mantra, the trees, the clouds, the layers ~is weft. Weft is not lesser. Without it there is no cloth, only a warp on a loom, which is what a great deal of well-intentioned Catholic social thought amounts to. But weft alone is a heap of thread.
Innovate, Educate, Collaborate. See, Judge, Act. What to change, what to change to, how to cause the change.
Three triads, one loom, and only one of them can tell you what the cloth is for.
Nota Bene: I write for people of any faith or none. For the family sitting in the pew on a Sunday morning with kids who really don’t want to be there.
The See–Judge–Act framework is gratefully borrowed from Joseph Cardijn.
I am a cultural historian with thirty-five years in emerging technology, in “Silicon Valley,” focusing today on the Anthropology of Technology. I explore topics such as the adoption of sustainable technologies, the social impact of digital devices, and the cultural adaptation of innovations. I analyze how technologies affect social organization, labor practices, and environmental outcomes, emphasizing that technology is never neutral but culturally situated, which has led me to be an AI Ethicist and a “killer” storyteller.