Imagine:
- The neck of a water bottle
- A blocked drain
- A clogged artery
- A traffic jam
All of these stop or slow a flow: of water, blood or traffic.
All of these are bottlenecks.
Bottlenecks are all around us but are especially important in business. One small part in our manufacturing process or in our sales funnel can greatly (negatively) affect our overall performance.
As Thomas Reid once said: “A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.”
While bottlenecks negatively impact a system, they can also (positively) serve as a source of inspiration: they force us to come up with alternate paths to success.
Small improvements in a bottleneck lead to outsized returns. Focusing on removing constraints is almost always the best use of your resources.
How to identify and deal with a bottleneck
In military strategy, a famous type of bottleneck is a choke point, like a bridge, valley or small passage. Forcing armies with greater numbers to pass through this takes away their numerical advantage. Smaller armies have successfully used terrain this way – as a force multiplier – countless times throughout history.
In business, it pays greatly to focus on improving bottlenecks. To uncover the bottleneck, identify your problem, then work backwards by asking why until you find the root cause. You’ll likely find:
- A process bottleneck, often bureaucracy, such as approvals or meetings, or equipment/technology restrictions, such as a step in the manufacturing process.
- A human bottleneck: “the one holding everyone back.”
To resolve it:
- Process bottleneck:
- Can the bottleneck be removed or reduced without negative consequences on the result? If it’s bureaucracy, the answer is almost always yes.
- Can the entire chain be rearranged so the bottleneck can happen in parallel instead of sequentially?
- Or think in first principles and redesign the entire solution from the ground up.
- Human bottleneck:
- Have the worst performer learn the process of the best performer.
- Reduce responsibilities – simplify the work – to encourage specialization and speed up learning. This can be a temporary or permanent solution.
- Change responsibilities to something in which one excels.
In life, our memory is often our biggest bottleneck. A lot of time is wasted remembering requests, occasions or where we left things, not to mention the drain on our mood and those around us.
Keeping things in one place, taking notes, keeping a diary, automating certain activities or reminders, or learning new habits help reduce dependency on your memory and make life easier.