As usual, well-curated internet-grazing reveals the obvious.
@visakanv has a Google Doc of a book-in-progress that referenced Tiago Forte blog posts talking about the theory of constraints.
Theory of constraints
Tiago Forte wrote some good blogposts about this. It’s a pretty old concept but it’s always relevant and it continues to be underappreciated. I’m a little lazy to get into this right now I’ll edit it in later maybe.
In a tweet: The only meaningful improvement you can make in any system is at its tightest bottleneck. Progress at the second tightest bottleneck is still constrained by the tightest bottleneck, and it can actually make things worse, because of congestion.
Less Unstrategic (a sure-to-be ephemeral Google Doc of a book in progress by @visakanv
Yeah I’ve done that reading. And I’ve buffed that information off the Great Mental Blackboard (I guess “these days” it’s a whiteboard, no?) As my friend Tom says, I have a superhero living in my head: Eraserman. 😀
If you ain’t doing it, you don’t know it. so I get no credit for reading Goldratt—except!—and this is an important exception!—that it prepared the mental soil for planting the seeds and growing the crop. (I’m proud of that janky sentence and I will leave it as-is.) (I am also proud of the fact that I have no fixed method of punctuation for sentence-ending quotation marks or closing parentheses. Do they go inside or outside the sentence? Yes.). (Heh.).
The point is . . .
I have not been operating with the theory of constraints in mind. I pick random bottlenecks to solve, based on attention (“Oh, look! A bottleneck! Let’s spend total time and attention on that bottleneck.”) rather than importance.
As noted above in the quote, this can make things worse: increasing rather than decreasing pressure at the number one important bottleneck. And I wonder why the load gets heavier over time . . . .
This will now become a daily question on my Power List.
“If I could solve one thing (in a given domain, e.g., health, a relationship, work) for maximum impact, what would that one thing be?
Me, asking myself a question
I rather suspect that the answer will come where vague, edgy discomfort lives. So . . . Let’s aggressively search out discomfort.
In Workland: the hard conversations are starting already. This is good. they happened even before the “theory of constraints” insight.
The reason we can’t do more, better (and doing more, better work is where the fun lives—trust me on this—it’s like a game at the top level) is because we lack skill. Work harder, put in the reps, get strong, get smart. There is no substitute.
The reason we can’t do more, better is because we don’t have the money for resources, especially to hire more, better people. Work harder, pick your customers better, pick your projects better, and work harder to absolutely master those projects.
Work harder. You think you work hard. You don’t. “Work smarter, not harder” is invoked by the person who doesn’t work harder, and is genuinely alarmed by the prospect of hard work.
So I have finally stopped being a co-conspirator in underperformance for the team (and myself, frankly, because I am an underperformed too by allowing those around me to underperform) and have set market-level performance goals for them. To their genuine alarm, I might add.
It’s not market-level of performance that is the important marker for achieving a dream, though. One of the people on the team blurted out a small piece of guarded truth-dream: to achieve black-belt level mastery in our domain.
I started to feel that way after a decade of very long hours and many many mistakes. Six and seven days a week of work and repeated, discouraging failure.
In my opinion, utter mastery comes only through intentional indefinite immersion. The willingness to put in market-level hours (for the market-level cubicle-dweller, not the master) is just the table stakes for mastery, for walking through fire with anti-gravity boots and heat shields while juggling tennis balls—because it’s fun!—while helping someone solve a life-changing dilemma.
I owe it to myself and to my team to hold the standard high and help them reach it—if they so desire. And if they don’t, that’s fine, and they should understand that black belt achievement for them is not in the cards.
This is the one constraint I, as a manager/leader/whatever, have refused to address. Reason: I felt it was unkind to say “work harder.” As a result of wanting to be nice, as a result of some misguided view of “work/life balance” (what a pernicious lie that phrase is!), I have avoided the hard conversations with the people around me.
Including my kids, to my shame. I have not been as straightforward with them as I could have been. And the results are visible. There are some fundamental misunderstandings of cause/effect in the universe that they don’t get. At all.
In time, they will have understanding thrust upon them, unbidden. Or the universe will kick them around like a soccer ball and they will have erratic lives, as if controlled by The Gods. But of course The Gods are not the cause of random misfortune. If you don’t understand the concept of rain and sometimes you get wet and sometimes you don’t? Well, that’s not the rain’s fault.
I’m now having the hard conversations (in a kind way) with team and my children. “No, this is what you need to do if you want to achieve your dreams.”
That’s my constraint: my unwillingness to talk honestly with those around me, thinking that they won’t like me, or they will be offended, or some other bullshit.
And that’s what I’m attacking head-on right now.
Well, not “head-on.”
From the Fourth Way reading I did long ago, I remember that the worst way to help people is to show up in their face and say “You know what your problem is? It is X!”
Trust me. They know. By putting your finger precisely on that pain point you make it more likely that the person you’re trying to help will in fact immediately throw up a permanent defensive barrier. All future communication is futile.
Be indirect. The Way of the Fox. Bring them to the realization themselves.
Sometimes direct communication is needed. “If you do X you will die.” Well, an uncle told me that and I persisted with X for another 15 years. I didn’t die but otherwise pretty much laid waste to my life. I was bankrupt in every other department of my life.
Only after I went splat was I able to hear other people give me the same message. But they would alway couch the message in a “Why don’t you think about . . .” or “Why don’t you try . . .” or “I suggest . . .” way.
But I digress.
Point taken: the current bottleneck in life is me getting over my weakness. What is that weakness?
