Ching delivered a talk titled "Rock, Paper, Scissors -- Stuff So Easy You Wouldn't Believe It Works" at Business of Software Conference Europe on May 16, 2016. At the time, he was Agile Lead at Royal London, the UK's largest mutual life and pensions company.
Content and approach
The talk focused on using everyday storytelling as a change management tool -- not user stories in the Agile sense, but real-world anecdotes, cartoons, and narrative analogies used to introduce Agile and TOC ideas in organizations without provoking resistance. Ching drew on the "Made to Stick" framework (simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, narrative) and argued that stories function as carriers for ideas -- memorable, reproducible, and non-threatening in ways that direct advocacy for change is not.
Key examples included the I Love Lucy chocolate factory scene (a bottleneck parable), a "buffalo story" about capacity constraints, and Steve Jobs's product strategy matrix. The talk explicitly connected storytelling technique to the broader business-novel-as-pedagogy approach that runs through Ching's writing career.
Significance
The Business of Software conference attracts software company founders, product leaders, and executives -- an audience more senior and commercially oriented than the typical Agile conference crowd. Ching's appearance there, in his role as Agile Lead at a major financial institution, represents a peak moment of his practitioner credibility: he was simultaneously applying TOC thinking inside a large organization and speaking about the approach at a selective, invitation-style conference.
The talk's emphasis on storytelling rather than TOC methodology directly is itself revealing. By 2016, Ching had realized that the meta-technique -- how to get people to adopt constraint thinking -- was as important as the constraint thinking itself. This insight informs his later work, particularly corkscrew-solutions and the-motorcade-method.