I am a reformed engineer.
You may not know this, but I trained as an electronics engineer, and “did a bit of engineering” a few (ahem!) years ago. The thing about engineering, or any technical discipline perhaps, is that you learn technical things that you want to apply to real life, and they never quite leave you.
I recently re-read The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt, Jeff Cox, and David Whitford, a novel about love, life and the theory of constraints! I highlighted this fab paragraph:
“First, make sure the bottlenecks’ time is not wasted,” he says. “How is the time of a bottleneck wasted? One way is for it to be sitting idle during a lunch break. Another is for it to be processing parts which are already defective — or which will become defective through a careless worker or poor process control. A third way to waste a bottleneck’s time is to make it work on parts you don’t need.”
These guys are talking about a manufacturing plant, where physical things are moved around a physical space and “processed” into more valuable things that can be sold. Imagine all the “things” that go into making your Tesla Model 3 — each thing needs to be in the right place, at the right time, moving smoothly through the factory. People can see the “things”, touch them, move them, transform them, to ultimately sell them. Waste occurs when the “things” don’t move smoothly through the system and cause bottlenecks. Waste causes less profit.
As a consultant, coach, speaker, thought leader-y type person many of the “things” you are “processing” are invisible (until you make them visible). Your processes include plenty of thinking, reading, synthesising, talking, listening, simplifying complexity, and finally creating things that other people can buy (courses, books, speeches, models, frameworks…)
My client, Ann Latham says, “If we brought the same attention to cognitive processes as we have to physical processes, we would realize the same kind of gains.”
If you find yourself a bit stuck getting to the final bit of your process — creating stuff other people can buy — you might find that you’re the bottleneck in your own process.
So, are you the bottleneck in your business?
