➔ Leadership in practice

In David Epstein's Inside the Box, there is a wonderful story about a swimmer who used a business school assignment to win an Olympic gold medal.

In 1992, Sheila Taormina was preparing to walk away from competitive swimming.

A senior at the University of Georgia, she’d failed to make the US Olympic team. At 5ft 2in, she lacked the size and power of the swimmers she needed to beat. But before retiring, she had business class left to complete that would ultimately change her life. 

One of the assignments asked students to apply the Theory of Constraints to a personal productivity challenge. The theory states that any complex system is limited in achieving its goals by a small number of constraints, or bottlenecks.

So for the assignment, Taormina looked for a constraint that was bottlenecking her swimming performance.

She began her assignment by drawing a systems map that identified all areas of her swimming career. Then she examined the entire system to identify the bottlenecks. Eventually, one stood out. Although her aerobic endurance was excellent, she wasn't as powerful as her competitors.

She realised that in all her years of training, she’s spent most of her time on aerobic endurance, but hardly any time on her strength.

As she dug deeper, she uncovered a more important problem. For years, she’d been reluctant to challenge her coaches. She didn't want to appear difficult or ungrateful. The result was that she spent most of her time improving the thing she was already good at.

"When I do not communicate with my coaches about practice, then I work on the wrong things," she wrote in her report.

After graduation, she returned to Michigan, found a coach she could partner with, and they spent the next four years targeting that constraint. She qualified for the Atlanta Olympics and went on to win gold.

With this new approach, she continued improving her system (story 2). Four years later, she competed in the triathlon and then the modern pentathlon. She competed in 3 different sports across four different Olympics, the only woman ever to do that

As Epstein points out, hunting for bottlenecks isn't rocket science, but we typically don't do it in a systematic way. We work harder on the things that are visible, familiar or comfortable (story 3). Taormina's insight was to step back, look at the whole system, and focus on the single constraint that was holding everything else back.

The thread running through this week’s newsletter is Bottlenecks.  

Go deeper:

Notes:

#1 At the 1996 Atlanta Games, she initially went as a relay alternate, but swam the fastest 200m split in the morning heats (2:00.57), which earned her a spot in the final and her gold medal.

#2 To chase later Olympic bids, she literally sold her house to fund training, spending time at the US Olympic Training Centre in Colorado before moving back to Michigan to work with coaches she trusted.

#3 The TOC mantra is that any improvement made before the real constraint just creates more work stuck in a queue, and any improvement made after it is irrelevant because that step is already starved of input.

➔ Systems and frameworks for thinking

In Eliyahu Goldratt's business novel The Goal, a scout troop heads off on a hike through the woods. At first, everything seems fine, but as the hike progresses, the group becomes stretched out. The fastest scouts disappear into the distance while the slower ones fall further behind.

The scoutmaster's instinct is to encourage everyone to walk faster, but that doesn't work. The problem isn't the average speed of the group. The problem is Herbie.

Herbie is carrying a heavy backpack and walks slower than everyone else. No matter how quickly the other scouts move, the troop can only travel as fast as Herbie. The troop's speed isn't determined by its fastest members. It's determined by its slowest one.

Once the scoutmaster spots the bottleneck, the solution becomes obvious. He moves Herbie to the front of the line and redistributes some of the weight from his backpack across the rest of the troop. The pace of the entire group improves.

Solving the Herbie problem wasn't the end of the story. If the troop kept hiking, another bottleneck would eventually appear. That's the nature of systems. Remove one constraint, and the next one becomes visible.

To manage this constant change, Goldratt developed a process called POOGI: the Process of Ongoing Improvement. The process uses the Theory of Constraints for continuous improvement and has five focusing steps:

First, find the bottleneck. What's the one thing slowing everything else down?

Second, get more from it. Before hiring people, buying software or redesigning the process, make sure you're getting the most from the bottleneck you've already got.

Third, stop working against it. Organise the rest of the system around the bottleneck rather than asking it to keep up with everything else.

Fourth, increase its capacity. Only now should you invest additional time, money or resources.

Finally, look for the next bottleneck. Remove one constraint and another will emerge.

Creative leaders are often guilty of skipping straight to step four. We hire more people, buy new tools, or redesign our processes before we’ve identified the real problem.

Notes:

#1 The Goal started life as a last‑ditch attempt to save Goldratt’s consulting business; he wrote it as a novel because he thought no one would read a dry operations textbook. It went on to sell over 7 million copies.

#2 Goldratt insisted that every real system has one primary constraint at any given time; if you see “constraints everywhere,” he’d say you haven’t actually done the hard work of choosing the real Herbie.

#3 In small businesses, the founder is often the Herbie. Every decision routes through them, so the company can only move at the speed of their calendar.

➔ Lifting the lid on what’s happening inside our brains when we do creative work

In the 1990s, psychologists Daniel Kahneman and David Schkade asked students across the United States a simple question: Are people in California happier than everyone else?

Most thought they must be. California meant sunshine, beaches, and warm weather. When asked to explain their reasoning, many pointed to the climate.

The researchers then compared Californians with people living elsewhere. There was little difference in overall life satisfaction. When people thought about California, they thought about sunshine. And once sunshine was in their minds, it started to carry more weight than it deserved.

Kahneman called this the focusing illusion. Years later, in Thinking, Fast and Slow, he summed it up with a line that I think about almost every week:

"Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it."

It's easy to see how this shows up at work. A project falls behind schedule and al you can think about is speeding things up. A colleague or client becomes challenging and suddenly every problem seems to have something to do with them. Sometimes those things really are the problem. But attention has a habit of narrowing our field of view. Once we've settled on our explanation, we stop looking elsewhere.

The thing demanding your attention is not always the same as the thing limiting your progress.

Neuroscientists have found that the brain's attention network prioritises information that is salient, novel or emotionally charged, which can make visible problems seem more important than they really are. The result is that we spend our energy fixing the most visible issue rather than the thing that is actually slowing the system down.

One way to test whether you've found the real bottleneck is to ask: If this disappeared tomorrow, what would still be slowing us down?

One more mental trick I use for when “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it." I do a little time travelling. I imagine myself a month in the future or a year in the future, then look back. Incredibly, the most important thing stops becoming the most important thing.

Go deeper:

Notes:

#1 The focusing illusion shows up most clearly for things that are easy to picture: sunshine, money, job titles, house size.

#2 Neuroscientists talk about a “salience network” in the brain – mainly the anterior insula and dorsal anterior cingulate – whose job is to notice what’s novel, emotionally charged, or relevant and yank your attention toward it.

#3 One of Kahneman’s favourite examples was the parent who insists children are the main source of joy in life, yet whose moment‑to‑moment happiness data suggests that childcare ranks somewhere between commuting and housework. The focusing illusion fills the gap with a nicer story.

🔗 Quick links to more stories 📖

Confidence and “Owning Your Seat.” - “Owning your seat simply means giving yourself the evidence that you belong, and then trusting that evidence. It is based on the premise that confidence comes from doing the work and putting in the reps…you are never going to be the best at anything, including the best version of yourself, unless you start to own your seat.” (5 min read)

Thinking Tools - “This course presents a collection of tools that are useful in creative problem solving which generally follows the steps of clarify, ideate, develop, and implement.” via Steve Bryant (Resource)

"Guide Yourself By The Stars And Not The Passing Ships" - Some good career advice from David Kenny, who has mentored over 30 CEO’s of billion-dollar companies. (5 min read)

Why passion, heart, and vision aren’t enough for some entrepreneurs - An excellent episode of Hidden Brain about why ideas fail. This touches on some of the points made in OK BRAIN 017 about doing the hard work. (90 min listen)

The Science Behind the Benefit of Self Talk - A good read from Psyche on why talking to yourself is good. Explicitly talking through goals takes effort. Because of the effort put in, our brains are more likely to keep the goal in mind, remember its importance, and keep working on it. (15 min read)

If you like this sort of stuff ⬆ you’ll love these ⬇