Something’s Gotta Give (Part 1)
I don’t make much of my living from politics anymore. Now, that’s not to say I don’t work with some campaigns here and there – the disclosures will indicate otherwise. However, it’s not my bread and butter.
Looking back, though, I started in politics as an arrogant, cocky, know-it-all 18-year old (like a lot of you…let’s be honest). I immediately dove in, and immediately got work, when I moved to Georgia in 2011. It’s how I became besties with our publisher. I worked campaigns, attended conventions, knew the players: this world was my professional home for a very, very long time. I have some amazing wins, some devastating losses, and a lot of friends and colleagues along the way.
Today, I run a consulting practice that helps business owners figure out why they can’t make a profit and why their cash flow won’t cooperate – particularly in real estate. My primary method is called the Theory of Constraints – a set of thinking tools developed in manufacturing that turns out to be devastatingly effective in all aspects of life. In fact, there’s quite a bit of talk these days in TOC circles about how the thinking process can be used to improve our political environment.
The idea is pretty simple: there is a constraint that system improvements must focus on. Find the constraint, elevate it, stabilize it, and do it again when the next constraint emerges. It requires clear thinking, and a barrier to clear thinking is the belief that problems are impossibly complex. We approach it differently: problems are exceedingly simple.
In practical terms, it means the single root cause underneath a pile of symptoms that all look like separate problems. I’m certified in it. I teach it. I use it every day with clients who are stuck and can’t figure out why. I find ways to make money in minutes that people have been struggling to find for months…or even years.
I mention this because it matters for what follows. I’m not writing this as a political operative with a side to defend. I’m writing it as someone who looks at broken systems – and someone who really enjoyed being an active Republican for so long – with a goal to answer 1 question:
Why is this happening?
I read the three articles here on PeachPundit – two by Jason and one by Scot – about Georgia’s election systems. The specific topic was the ongoing dispute over paper ballots, touchscreen voting, election integrity claims, and who deserves credit for various legislative efforts over the years.
Just for reference, here are the articles:
Where Abrams failed, McKoon says “Hold My Beer”
No, Stacey Abrams Didn’t Bring Hand-Marked Paper Ballots to Georgia
I must have hit a nerve…but Scot Turner didn’t bring hand-paper ballots to Georgia either.
Reading any one of those articles individually, I wouldn’t have thought twice. Political writers disagree. They make their cases. That’s the job.
But reading them together, something bothered me.
Both authors were stating facts. Both were making observations that were, on their own terms, factually defensible. And yet the collective result wasn’t a conversation that moved anyone closer to understanding what Georgia voters actually need from their election system. It was a fight over credit, over who said what first, over who misrepresented whom — conducted publicly, between two people who are remarkably ideologically consistent with one another.
That’s the part that stuck. Not the disagreement. The shape of the disagreement. Two people who largely agree on the underlying policy, spending thousands of words in a public forum speaking more to each other’s credibility, timeline, and motives — and at no point does either one ask: What does the voter actually need to know to have confidence in their elections?
The question I couldn’t shake:
Why does this keep happening this way?
Of course, their very public conversation isn’t an isolated one. We see this happen all the time in tweets, posts, and very public diatribes. The anger is palpable right now. It’s tangible. There’s just this funk over our politics that has burst into the open. It’s not even really about policy anymore. It’s entertainment…almost gladiatorial entertainment.
That question is the one I’m trained to answer. Not politically – structurally. One of the tools I use almost daily is called the Current Reality Tree. It works like this: you start with the observable problems — the things you can point at and say, “this is happening and it shouldn’t be.” Then you trace backward through cause and effect, one step at a time, asking why? at every level. Not “why” as an accusation. “Why” as a genuine investigation. If this is happening, what must be true one level below it for this to exist?
You keep going until you find the place where the causal chains converge — the single root cause that, if it changed, would change everything above it. That’s what you work on. Everything else is a symptom. It’s why we say in TOC circles that reality is exceedingly simple.
What makes this different from just arguing about politics is the discipline. With the CRT, every connection has to pass a simple test: if [this cause], then [this effect]. If you can’t read the arrow as a sufficient explanation, the logic has a gap and you have to go find what’s missing. It’s methodical. It’s purposeful. And it produces answers that don’t care about your feelings or mine.
I built a Current Reality Tree for the system that produced those three articles. Not a tree about election policy. A tree about why public policy discourse is broken — using those articles (and others at Peach Pundit) as the observable evidence that something deeper is going on.
You can read the full tree here:
It traces from a single root cause up through dozens of intermediate effects to observable problems at the top. You’ll find the root cause in the bottom right hand corner of the diagram. When you look at the tree, start at the bottom and read upward. Each box is an effect. Each arrow says “this causes that.” Where multiple arrows converge on a single box, it means those causes together are sufficient to produce the effect — no single one of them does it alone. The reinforcing loops — where an effect feeds back into its own cause — are the places where the system locks itself in and resists change.
Every arrow is readable as “if this, then this.” In fact, it’s quite simple to read aloud. Simply say “If [read the box content], then [read the box the arrow you’re following goes to]. If you think a connection is wrong, that’s useful — it means we’ve found a place where the logic needs to be tested, and testing logic is exactly the point.
But the tree is the evidence. Let me tell you what it found. The root cause is not political. It’s not ideological. It’s not about left or right, Republican or Democrat, Shepherd or Turner.
People accumulate negative life experiences that reinforce a feeling of abandonment and isolation.
That’s it. That’s the bottom of the tree.
I know how that sounds. You came here expecting an article about Georgia politics and I’m telling you the root cause is emotional. It’s actually funny, because I’ve casually made this comment to Scot multiple times when we’ve just talked. Intuitively, it made sense to me. Now, I can logically show it. So, stay with me, because this is where the methodology earns its keep.
When people accumulate negative experiences — and I’m not talking about dramatic trauma, I’m talking about the ordinary accumulation of being overlooked, let down, left out, dismissed — those experiences create patterns. Defensiveness. A heightened need for belonging. A need to feel personally relevant. These patterns become the foundation of how people make decisions and how they communicate. Not through deliberate calculation, but through intuition — the gut-level sense of what’s right and what’s dangerous that operates faster than conscious thought.
Those patterns don’t stay private. People carry them into every community they join. And when they carry them into the political arena — an arena with almost no barriers to entry, enormous cultural weight, and a zero-sum structure that measures belonging by winning — those patterns produce specific, predictable, traceable dysfunction.
The tree maps exactly how:
The win-protect cycle, where winning creates something to lose and belonging becomes defensive rather than relational.
The transactional architecture, where standing depends on allegiance rather than analysis.
The absent diagnostic practice, where the conditions for clear thinking are systematically eliminated by the very dynamics the arena creates.
The sorting mechanism, where thoughtful people with genuine belonging elsewhere gradually disengage, concentrating the arena with participants whose strongest unmet need is the belonging the arena provides.
And the doubt industry — the ecosystem of actors who recognize, most intuitively and a strategic few quite consciously, that the public’s fragmented attention is the product being sold.
And think about this in our Georgia political environment right now. I’ll invite our Democratic readers to comment on their experience, but ours in the Republican party is pretty consistent with the logical tree. Just take the decisions by the party to jettison long practiced customs of neutrality (and documented rules to enforce it locally), and the responses to that behavior.
Not truth. Not resolution. Fragmentation.
Each of these branches is built from cause-and-effect logic, not opinion. Each can be tested by asking: is this arrow sufficient? If I accept this cause, does this effect necessarily follow? Where the answer is no, the tree has a gap. Gaps are not failures — they’re invitations to investigate further.
This matters because if the root cause is what the tree says it is, then most of what passes for political debate is addressing symptoms. Arguing about who proposed paper ballots first doesn’t address why the argument takes the shape it does. Fact-checking each other’s timelines doesn’t explain why two ideologically aligned people end up in a public credibility fight instead of a collaborative policy discussion.
Calling for better candidates, better media, better voters — none of it touches the actual constraint.
The constraint is that people carry unresolved experiences of abandonment and isolation into an arena that has no mechanism to process them. The arena doesn’t ask, “Are you thinking clearly?” The arena asks, “Whose side are you on?” And once you answer that question, the system takes over.
The good news — and this is where the methodology actually becomes useful rather than just diagnostic — is that the Theory of Constraints doesn’t stop at identifying what’s wrong. It provides tools for figuring out what to change, what to change to, and how to cause the change.
So, I’m making this Part 1 of a three-part series.
In Part 2, I’ll use a tool called the Evaporating Cloud to surface the assumptions that allow this root cause to persist.
These are the beliefs — mostly unexamined, mostly operating below conscious awareness — that make the current system feel inevitable. They’re the reason people say “that’s just how politics works” and accept it. The Cloud doesn’t argue with those assumptions. It tests them. And when an assumption fails the test, a door opens.
In Part 3, I’ll lay out the injections — the specific changes that, if introduced, would break the causal chains in the tree and produce a different set of outcomes. Not utopian outcomes. Realistic ones. Changes that acknowledge how people actually behave while creating conditions where better behavior becomes possible.
But before any of that, I want to do something that the system described in this tree almost never does.
I want to ask you what you think.
Not what you think about Shepherd or Turner or paper ballots or election integrity. What you think about the root cause.
Does the causal logic hold? Does the tree miss something your experience would add? Is there an arrow that doesn’t pass the sufficiency test — a place where you read “if this, then this” and your honest response is “no, that’s not enough to explain it”?
The Theory of Constraints works better when more perspectives test the logic. A Current Reality Tree built by one person captures one person’s experience and reasoning. Every additional perspective that tests and refines the tree makes it more robust — not because every perspective is equally correct, but because every perspective carries experiences that might reveal a gap in the logic that one person couldn’t see alone.
I’m making my living now by approaching every problem as if it needs two things:
First is discipline: the capability to build the trees, test the logic, and ask the investigative questions. It’s a skills that’s learned, thankfully, so everyone one of us can get better at it. Second is experience: the communication of our decision making based on our intuition that has been developed over time.
Not everything offered will change the tree — some contributions will test the logic and find it holds, some will reveal genuine gaps, some will surface assumptions worth examining, and some of it is just Gary Busey. But the act of being heard, of having your experience treated as evidence worth investigating rather than a position to be argued against — that is itself part of the solution this series is working toward.
The tree is open. The logic is testable. And the question on the table is the one the political arena almost never asks:
Why is this actually happening?
