Context: I’ve read The Goal, but not analyzed it
The Goal
- two main parts of TOC are goals and focus
- goals that involve a process of ongoing improvement
- aim at throughput, i.e., success at our goal
- to succeed at our goal we need to focus on the things that actually improves towards the goal, i.e., we need to focus on global optima
- global optima improvements improve on parts that hold back other parts of achieving the goal. those parts are called bottlenecks (constraints, limiting factors)
- there’s usually one one bottleneck like there’s only one weakest link in a chain, and the strength of the chain as a whole depends only on the weakest link
- global optima improvements improve on parts that hold back other parts of achieving the goal. those parts are called bottlenecks (constraints, limiting factors)
- because most improvements are optimizing local optima and are either marginally beneficial, useless or even counterproductive towards our big vision goal
- to succeed at our goal we need to focus on the things that actually improves towards the goal, i.e., we need to focus on global optima
throughput: the whole process of achieving a goal including getting the end. Does that definition of “throughput” work?
In general, there’s only one bottleneck. This is like a metal chain: a chain has only one weakest link.
How do we know it’s like this in general? Why does the chain analogy apply in general? Why not a bunch of things going wrong at about an equal amount?
My guess is that we have just observed this to be the case.
I guess it’s not just in a technical way because there’s rarely two factors that are exactly equally weak. But rather that there’s usually one factor that’s weaker by a substantial margin? Like the weakest link is at 10% while the next weakest link is at 37% rather than 12%. I’m thinking that a situation with one 10% and another at 12% would be a situation with two bottlenecks.
Even if a bunch of things were going wrong, usually one is going the most wrong. so focus on that one and then move on to the other things which were going wrong. maybe we can’t improve the other things until we fix the very weakest link. Maybe fixing the weakest link makes fixing the other weak spots faster.