Listen to the podcast here

Barriers, Bottlenecks, and Breakdowns

Hey, everybody, I am really excited to be here with you. And I want to talk about bottlenecks, barriers and breakdowns today.

So, when I think about bottlenecks, I really think about Eliyahu Goldratt. And the Theory of Constraints. So Eliyahu Goldratt, was an Israeli physicist, and he worked a lot in manufacturing.

And if you think about a factory floor, where you’re producing something like automobiles that flows through an assembly line, for example, then we think about throughput. And we think about the amount of work that is produced through that factory line. But when we apply this to knowledge work, we also have the knowledge, work throughput, the amount of work that we produce.

And as we produce that work, there is always a bottleneck for what keeps us from being able to produce more. If we don’t have enough orders, then the bottleneck is sales. We want to apply ourselves to the sales process so that we are full of orders so that our factory or our knowledge work can produce the most amount of work possible. If we have plenty of sales, but we’re slower on the delivery, then we’ll have a different bottleneck to focus on.

What I like to think about when I think about leadership and bottlenecks is that there’s always one bottleneck. And that’s always where we as leaders should be aware, we should have explicit awareness that we have one bottleneck that we’re working on all the time. That doesn’t mean that we don’t have other meetings that we don’t talk about other things that we don’t prep other processes. But we always have one bottleneck to the bat that inhibits the throughput of our organization, in our time should be explicitly focused on that bottleneck on a very regular basis, like a daily basis in our work. And once we clear that bottleneck, we’ll always have the next bottleneck, the place that flow in our organization is constricted, that the throughput of work is constrained or constricted, is the important bottleneck. Now sometimes we come up with something that I like to call a barrier.

And a barrier is kind of when we hit an impasse. And we hit an impasse for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it’s regulatory. Sometimes it’s an external process. Sometimes it’s a funding issue if we’re dealing with government or not-for-profit work. But sometimes we hit an impasse. And I like to think of those as barriers. And we have to be more creative around those barriers. And sometimes we just have to allow that we’ve hit a barrier and you know, do a U-turn and figure out a new path. And when that happens, we actually have what I call a breakdown like we get stuck, and we’re unable to solve a problem.

And that can actually cause a breakdown in our organization. And we actually aren’t able to deliver the throughput that we want to in our organization because we’ve actually had a problem that we can’t solve. But most problems are solvable in our world. And so, I always like to think about how can we solve breakdowns, barriers and bottlenecks.
From my point of view, there’s three ways to address a bottleneck barrier or breakdown. One is, we can devote more time and resources to it. So, can we take the smartest minds in our organization and apply them to it? The second is knowledge is are we actually missing a piece of knowledge, something that we can learn, or someone that we can hire, to fill a knowledge gap that will help remove a barrier, or speed up a bottleneck or fix a breakdown? So, can we acquire knowledge in some way we can either hire it or learn it? And then the last is, do we not have the willingness to solve that problem? like are we not applying ourselves? Are we not paying attention? Eliyahu Goldratt also said that management attention was the biggest bottleneck in North America. So, if we’re not attentive to that bottleneck, then that actually can be the reason for it. So, can we pay attention? Can we apply our willingness? And if we’re not willing, then we either can hire someone, or we can outsource it.

So those are sort of the ways that we can solve the barriers breakdowns and bottlenecks in our organization. I hope this is helpful. I think that as you start to realize that you really want to hold that one singular focus on your bottleneck most of the time. I think it’s really empowering. And I think it really supercharges your leadership, I think it’ll be really interesting to hear what you’re struggling with, what’s your biggest bottleneck? I hope you have fun with this and go experiment.

 

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!

Join The Experimental Leader community today: