Basic human needs are pretty stable.
As long as we live, we’ll need sustenance, safety, love, understanding, creativity, recreation, belonging, autonomy, and meaning.
But how those human needs get met… that is always changing, with new ways always being discovered, often (but not always) with a profit motivation.
And once a desirable new way is discovered, the next challenge is repeatability. Organizations are born and grow around this challenge of doing a thing again and again.
The doing of the thing repeatably reveals the goal of the system. (It’s important to be blunt here, no fluffy statements.) For instance, it’s to make money by producing widgets or certain outcomes. Or it’s to turn money into progress towards ____.
What’s the goal of your system?
“It’s simple, we turn ___ into ___.”
And in pursuit of the goal, we care about throughput. The rate of that repeatable doing, from the very beginning of the process to the very end. 1 widget sold per hour. 1 business outcome delivered per month. One life changed per day.
If there’s throughput to be measured, then there’s a single bottleneck in the process from start to finish (yes, just one bottleneck) that holds throughput back. (This should sound familiar, if you’ve encountered Goldratt and the Theory of Constraints. If not, this blog series is excellent.)
What’s the bottleneck in your system?
“The single thing that sets the pace of the whole system is ___.”
If you want to improve throughput (as you likely do), Goldratt offers five focusing steps:
Figure out what the bottleneck is.
Make sure the bottleneck is performing as best it can, individually.
Slow down the rest of the entire process from start to finish to match the pace set by the bottleneck.
Only then, add capacity to the bottleneck.
Begin again! (The bottleneck may move to another part of the system.)
So much trouble comes from the rest of the system trying to go faster than the pace set by the bottleneck, or from trying to skip straight to adding capacity to the bottleneck (thereby worsening performance of the whole system).
Importantly, the bottleneck is not something troublesome to eliminate. Instead, it is something vital to care for, the key to making the whole system perform.
Ben and David
StrategyTeaming.com