Some years ago – according to a story I’m fairly sure is true, and which I’ve decided is definitely true for the purposes of today’s column – the operators of Houston airport faced a headache. Travellers on one specific route kept complaining about how long they had to wait for their luggage. Extra baggage handlers were hired, cutting waiting times to eight minutes, but complaints continued unabated. Further study revealed that passengers spent one minute walking to baggage claim, then seven waiting, prompting some bright spark to devise a solution: switch the arrival gate, so the walk took far longer. The result was less time standing around, and much less grumbling.

Airport luggage is a classic example of a bottleneck, “a resource that can’t keep up with the demand placed on it”, to borrow a definition from The Bottleneck Rules, a recent short book by Clarke Ching, drawing on the work of the legendary business scholar Eli Goldratt. And bottlenecks are everywhere – from traffic jams to self-checkout machines to work meetings that proceed, as the saying goes, “at the pace of the slowest mind in the room”.

Ching’s title is a play on words: he offers rules for dealing with bottlenecks, but it’s an implacable truth that a bottleneck rules whatever system it afflicts. So fixing a bottleneck delivers vastly disproportionate benefits. (I doubt Ching or Goldratt would approve of the Houston airport solution, as it depends on trickery, not truly speeding things up.) By contrast, if you fail to fix a bottleneck, improving anything else may be a waste of time: no point getting your baristas to take orders twice as fast if the espresso machines take two minutes per coffee regardless. Indeed, “improving” things while neglecting bottlenecks can make matters worse. If you supercharge your employees’ efficiency, yet Gerald at head office still has to approve their every move, they’ll just spend more time feeling frustrated.

It’s trickier to apply bottleneck thinking to the woolly world of “creative” work, of which I self-flatteringly count myself a member. But the most obvious bottleneck is brains and their capacity for thinking. So it’s a better idea to focus on safeguarding that resource – to get enough sleep, to schedule time for deep work – than discovering ingenious new ways to (say) blaze through emails. And if you can’t eliminate all your brain’s limitations, you can take solace, Ching would say, in the fact that you have the right bottleneck. If you do creative work and your bottleneck is something else, such as your internet connection, you’re letting brainpower go to waste.

Could the bottleneck perspective help make society fairer, too? The legal scholar Joseph Fishkin argues that most efforts at promoting “equality of opportunity” simply involve funnelling people, with a bit more fairness, toward the same societal bottlenecks – such as needing a degree to do jobs that don’t require one. Fishkin thinks we’d be better off loosening the bottlenecks, for instance by expanding the range of jobs that don’t demand a degree.

For journalists, one major bottleneck is the time it takes to think of endings to articles. It’s the only reason I missed my deadline this week. As always, the bottleneck ruled.

Read this

Go deep into bottleneck thinking with The Goal, the eccentric “business novel” by Eli Goldratt that outlines the philosophy he called the Theory of Constraints.