The Thinking Processes (TP) are a suite of logical analysis tools that eliyahu-goldratt developed in the early 1990s as TOC's most general problem-solving framework. Goldratt considered the Thinking Processes his most important contribution — more so than any specific operational method — because they provide a rigorous methodology for identifying what to change, what to change to, and how to cause the change, applicable to any complex system.
The toolkit comprises five primary tools:
The TPs were developed during the thinking-processes-development era and first made widely accessible through its-not-luck (1994), where they appeared in narrative form. h-william-dettmer and lisa-scheinkopf each produced systematic technical treatments that formalized the rules of TP construction, making them teachable without Goldratt's presence.
The launch-of-satellite-program in the mid-1990s was substantially devoted to teaching the TPs to a global practitioner base. The TPs embody Goldratt's conviction — articulated most fully in the-choice — that inherent-simplicity means complex problems yield to rigorous cause-and-effect reasoning, and that apparent dilemmas are almost always the product of flawed assumptions rather than genuine trade-offs.