One bottleneck at a time

This month, we’re going to think about our teams, departments, and organisations as systems. Specifically, we’re going to consider how we can increase throughput and output by identifying and removing the biggest bottleneck at any given time.

This might sound obvious, but it’s surprisingly rare in practice. Most leaders spread their effort across many initiatives simultaneously, making partial progress on everything and completing nothing. The insight we’ll explore is that systems don’t work that way: there’s always one constraint that matters most, and focusing elsewhere is, at best, wasted effort.

Here’s what we’re going to cover:

• We’ll start by looking at a pattern I call the scattered leader, which is the well-intentioned but ineffective approach of fighting on multiple fronts at once.
• Then we’ll dig into the core insight from Eliyahu Goldratt’s The Goal and the Theory of Constraints: every system has a single primary bottleneck, and improving anything else doesn’t improve the system.
• We’ll look at a practical example of what happens when you put your best people on unglamorous but critical work.
• And we’ll talk about the courage required to subordinate everything else