Current Reality Tree
also CRT
A cause-and-effect diagram that traces a system's many undesirable effects back to a small number of root causes, so you can fix the underlying problem instead of fighting symptoms.
A Current Reality Tree (CRT) is, in standard Goldratt Thinking Processes terminology, the named diagram that answers the first change question — what to change? — by mapping the logical cause-and-effect links beneath a system’s symptoms. You start from observed Undesirable Effects and reason downward, connecting them until many separate complaints turn out to share one underlying core problem. Fixing that root cause makes the whole cluster of symptoms disappear, whereas attacking symptoms individually wastes effort. (The “CRT” label itself comes from Goldratt’s ToC literature, not from the CF source material.)
What the CF treatment actually describes is the underlying Effect-Cause-Effect method: find a problem (which is also an effect), guess a candidate cause, derive other effects that cause would also produce, predict them, and check reality. CF folds in Critical Rationalist discipline — don’t just accumulate confirmations of your favorite cause; consider rival theories and look for predictions where they disagree, so a test can actually rule something out. This makes root-cause analysis a refutation-seeking exercise rather than a justification-building one.
The deeper CF point is that complex systems have very few load-bearing causes. When everything is connected by dependencies, well under 1% of factors drive over 99% of outcomes — so CF infers that locating the real root is, in effect, locating the constraint worth acting on. This aligns with CF’s broader stance: prefer simple underlying explanations, and don’t locally optimize symptoms. Once the core problem is found, ToC moves to the Evaporating Cloud and Future Reality Tree to design and validate the fix.