The ProConCloud Method
Pattern: A named solution to a recurring problem.
Combine the Pros-Cons list, the Change Matrix, and the Evaporating Cloud into a five-step sequence that surfaces the assumptions blocking a chronic decision and designs a win-win injection instead of a compromise.
Also known as: ProCon cloud; PCC; the ProConCloud process.
Most chronic problems aren’t unsolved because nobody knows the cure. They’re unsolved because the people who could act over-estimate the cost or risk of changing and under-estimate the benefit, so they stay where they are. Alan Barnard built the ProConCloud to attack that gap directly: it takes Benjamin Franklin’s pros-cons list, Goldratt’s Change Matrix, and Goldratt’s Evaporating Cloud, keeps what each does well, and patches the place where each runs out.
Understand This First
• The Change Matrix — the four-force diagnosis (alligator, mermaid, pot of gold, crutches) that ProConCloud turns into a resolution process.
• Evaporating Cloud — the conflict-resolution tool whose assumption-challenging discipline ProConCloud inherits and extends.
• Six Layers of Resistance — the buy-in sequence ProConCloud feeds when a chosen change still has to survive other stakeholders.
Context
The ProConCloud sits at the edge of the Thinking Processes, alongside the Change Matrix and the recent change-management literature. It targets the chronic problem: the behavior or situation that persists for years, won’t resolve itself, and survives every round of more education, more warnings, and more willpower. Barnard’s claim is that these problems usually aren’t failures of knowledge. They’re failures of change management. The person knows enough to act and still doesn’t, because an unresolved conflict between changing and not-changing holds them in place.
Two TOC tools already address pieces of this. The Change Matrix lists the four forces around a change: the pot of gold (the positive of changing), the alligator (the negative of not changing), the mermaid (the positive of not changing), and the crutches (the negative of changing). The Evaporating Cloud verbalizes a problem as a conflict between two requirements and challenges the assumptions underneath it. Each has a gap. The matrix surfaces the four forces but offers no mechanism when they’re balanced. The cloud resolves conflicts but ignores the negative of changing and the positive of not changing (the mermaid and the crutches), and it gives no guidance on which assumption to challenge first. The ProConCloud is the method Barnard built to close both gaps at once, in a sequence a person can run without a facilitator.
Problem
A chronic decision presents as a choice between two actions: change or stay, or change A versus change B. Treated as a straight choice, it gets handled by mental arithmetic: weigh the pros, weigh the cons, pick the heavier pile. That’s Franklin’s method, and it fails the same way every time. The decision-maker stays inside their existing biases, never tests the assumptions that made one side look heavier, and ends up either frozen or settling for a compromise that satisfies nobody.
A bare Evaporating Cloud helps, but on its own it leaves two of the four forces unexamined. It surfaces the conflict and the assumptions between the boxes, yet it doesn’t ask what the person would lose by changing (the mermaid) or what they’d risk in the act of changing (the crutches). Those are exactly the forces that block a win-win solution, because they’re the ones the decision-maker is most reluctant to say out loud. A method that skips them produces a resolution that looks clean on paper and gets quietly rejected in practice.
Forces
• People over-estimate the cost of change and under-estimate its benefit. Loss aversion and status-quo bias make the alligator feel distant and the crutches feel certain, so doing nothing looks safer than it is.
• The positive of not changing is the hardest force to name. A smoker asked for the benefit of smoking first hears it as a benefit of quitting. The mermaid is real and usually unspoken, which is why the conflict persists.
• A balanced matrix gives no decision rule. When the pot of gold and alligator look matched by the mermaid and crutches, the four-box diagnosis stalls — it shows the conflict without resolving it.
• Compromise is the default failure mode. Without a way to challenge the limiting assumptions, the decision-maker splits the difference, which usually preserves the conflict rather than dissolving it.
• Yes-buts sink half-baked solutions. Even a good injection fails if it ignores stakeholders’ reservations about insufficiency, side effects, or obstacles.
Solution
Run the five-step ProConCloud sequence, each step answering one question and guarding against one common mistake.
| Step | Question | What it produces |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Gap analysis | Why change? | The problem stated with its local and system-wide consequences, so effort isn’t spent on a non-problem. |
| 2. Conflict analysis | What to change? | The decision verbalized as a conflict, with all four forces (pot of gold, alligator, mermaid, crutches) and the assumptions behind each. |
| 3. Conflict resolution | What to change to? | A win-win injection found by challenging the limiting assumptions, using Barnard’s four resolution methods. |
| 4. Yes-but analysis | How to improve it? | Stakeholders’ reservations surfaced as insufficiencies, potential negatives, and obstacles, each answered with an additional change. |
| 5. Best-practice definition | How do we know it’ll work? | The complete solution written so others can check the logic, with clear measures of success and failure. |
Step 3 is the engine. Rather than picking the heavier pile, the practitioner applies four resolution methods, each a question that forces a more creative answer than the conflict allowed:
• Change++. If I change, what can I add so the change doesn’t cost me my valid current mermaids and doesn’t create real future crutches?
• Not-Change++. If I don’t change, what can I add to the status quo so it stops costing me the future pot of gold and removes the current alligators?
• When to change versus when not to. Under what conditions should I change, and under what conditions should I not? This yields a rule: as long as one condition holds, stay; the moment another appears, change.
• Another change. Is there a different change entirely that delivers more of the positives with fewer of the negatives?
The practitioner runs all four and selects the one (or the combination) that captures the most pot of gold and mermaid while shedding the most alligator and crutches.
Name the mermaid before you resolve anything: The positive of not changing is the force the decision-maker most wants to skip, and the method fails without it. If step 2 records only the pot of gold and alligator (the comfortable forces), the resolution in step 3 will challenge the wrong assumptions and produce a solution the person quietly abandons. The discipline is to verbalize the mermaid and crutches as honestly as the pot of gold, even when they’re embarrassing.
How It Plays Out
A chronic personal habit resists every warning. Take medication non-adherence, Barnard’s worked example: adherence for chronic conditions sits around 50 to 60 percent despite clear evidence the medication prevents harm. The pot of gold is getting better; the alligator is the risk of a heart attack or stroke. But the unspoken mermaid is avoiding the hassle, side effects, and cost of taking the medication exactly as prescribed, plus being fussed over by family. Step 3’s Change++ asks what to add to “take the medication” so it stops costing the patient those mermaids: a simpler dosing schedule, a reminder system, a way to manage side effects. The win-win is a change the patient will actually sustain, not a sterner warning.
An organizational decision is stuck between two changes. A team debates centralizing a function versus leaving it distributed. Treated as a straight choice, each side defends its pile and the decision oscillates. As a ProConCloud, the conflict is verbalized with all four forces on both options, the limiting assumptions are surfaced, and the resolution methods look for a design that captures centralization’s coordination gains without losing the local responsiveness the distributed model protects. The output isn’t a compromise that half-centralizes; it’s an injection that dissolves the conflict the two options posed.
A sound solution stalls on yes-buts. A practitioner reaches step 3 with a clean injection, then runs step 4 and hears the reservations: “Yes, but it’s insufficient unless we also fix intake.” “Yes, but it’ll hurt the support team.” “Yes, but procurement blocks it.” Each yes-but becomes a yes-and, an additional change that closes the insufficiency, prevents the side effect, or clears the obstacle, before the solution is written up in step 5 with the measures that let others check whether it worked.
Consequences
Benefits. The ProConCloud gives a decision-maker a complete, self-serve sequence for the chronic conflicts that the Change Matrix and the bare Evaporating Cloud each leave half-finished. It carries the matrix’s four forces into a resolution process and adds the matrix’s missing decision rule; it keeps the cloud’s assumption-challenging discipline and adds the two forces the cloud ignores. Because the method drives toward a win-win injection rather than a compromise, it tends to surface solutions the decision-maker had ruled out by unexamined assumption. The step-4 yes-but pass makes the solution implementable by answering reservations before they become resistance, and step 5 leaves an auditable record others can challenge and improve.
The method also makes the Change Matrix and Evaporating Cloud easier to teach. A practitioner who has run a ProConCloud on a personal chronic problem has exercised both underlying tools and felt where each one stops, which is a faster route into the formal Thinking Processes than studying them cold.
Liabilities. The method’s power depends on honesty about the mermaid and crutches, and those are precisely the forces a decision-maker is biased to understate. A ProConCloud built on a sanitized conflict analysis resolves the wrong problem. The evidence base is also field-test claim rather than settled canon: Barnard reports five years of field testing, but the method is recent and far less validated than DBR or the Five Focusing Steps, and it should be presented as a promising decision-support process, not as established doctrine on par with the core tools.
There’s a scope risk as well. The ProConCloud is built for chronic conflicts where an unresolved decision keeps the problem in place. It isn’t a general substitute for the full Thinking Processes: a problem with many interrelated undesirable effects still wants a Current Reality Tree, and a polarity that genuinely cannot be resolved (only managed) isn’t a conflict the method should try to dissolve. Using it everywhere flattens distinctions the field exists to preserve.
Related Articles
Complements: Fundamental Structure of ToC — ProConCloud is part of the post-2010 Body of Knowledge expansion that Schragenheim and Updegrove's structural account has to absorb.
Complements: Six Layers of Resistance — ProConCloud diagnoses and answers the loss and risk aversion behind change resistance before the buy-in conversation turns into persuasion.
Complements: ToC for Personal Dilemmas — Both apply the TOC conflict lens at personal as well as organizational scale; ProConCloud packages that work into a self-serve sequence.
Extends: Evaporating Cloud (Conflict Resolution Diagram) — The method borrows the cloud's assumption-surfacing discipline and win-win logic, then adds the positive-of-change and negative-of-not-change forces the bare cloud leaves out.
Extends: The Change Matrix — ProConCloud carries the Change Matrix's four competing forces (pot of gold, alligator, mermaid, crutches) into a resolution process when the matrix shows the forces are balanced.
Sources
• Alan Barnard, “Solving That Problem That’s Plagued You Forever: The ProConCloud Method”, TOCICO-recognized Body of Knowledge paper (2023). Primary source for the five-step process, the four resolution methods (Change++, Not-Change++, when-to-change, another-change), the medication-adherence worked example, and the account of where the Change Matrix and Evaporating Cloud each fall short.
• Eliyahu M. Goldratt, Change Matrix material as transmitted through the TOC change literature. The four-force change analogy — pot of gold, alligator, mermaid, crutches — that ProConCloud carries forward; treated in this book under The Change Matrix.
• Cox, TOCICO Dictionary of Theory of Constraints Terms (2nd ed., 2012), entries “evaporating cloud,” “chronic conflict,” “change analogy,” “injection,” and “win-win.” The certification vocabulary this entry cross-checks against, especially the five-box cloud and the chronic-conflict definition that frames the problem the method targets.
• Cox and Schleier, Theory of Constraints Handbook (2010), Ch. 20 (Goldratt-Ashlag, “The Layers of Resistance”) and Ch. 38 (Cox and Schleier, “Theory of Constraints for Personal Productivity/Dilemmas”). Handbook grounding for the resistance-to-change sequence the method feeds and for the personal-scale conflict work it generalizes.