One of the most useful lessons I ever learned was from a course I desperately didn’t want to take — Operations. I had always thought of “operations” as a manufacturing thing—the business of how to get materials from one place to another so work could be done on them. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Operations was, instead, how to set up and monitor efficient processes.

Instead of operations being about supply chains and assembly lines, a subject I had little interest in, it’s really about efficiency. Efficiency in all things—from how you design an efficient process to how to make sure what you do is high quality.

One of the most significant lessons is that improving the efficiency of one part of a process, without considering the larger picture, can actually DECREASE the overall efficiency of the entire process. Put another way, local optimization often has a negative impact on global optimization. By contrast, finding that lynchpin spot that affects the whole and optimizing that spot can have a monumental, positive impact.

One good analogy is traffic. Imagine a highway with three lanes that then narrows down to two lanes. Traffic is such that there is often a backup where it narrows to two lanes. Adding a fourth lane to the three lanes will do nothing to help traffic flow as the two lanes, already overwhelmed, won’t be able to handle the added flow. On the other hand, adding a third lane to the two lanes will have a dramatic and positive impact on traffic flow, eliminating the bottleneck.

Similarly, it is a common misconception that improving efficiency within individual departments or areas is always beneficial. While it can have advantages, it is crucial to consider the broader effects throughout the system. Eliyahu Goldratt, author of The Goal, and a leading voice on the theory of constraints, argues that making anything more efficient, apart from the “constraint” or bottleneck where work accumulates, will lead to unfavorable outcomes. Optimizing any part except the bottleneck will only cause more work to pile up at the bottleneck. On the other hand, enhancing the efficiency of the constraint will yield significant, often remarkable, positive results. Therefore, it is essential to focus efforts on optimizing the constraint to achieve optimal system performance.

In short, focus your efforts on relieving the bottleneck!

This is thinking globally instead of locally. Of course, to do so one must have a deep knowledge of the entire larger system to be able to understand where optimization will best be made locally. Optimizing at that place will pay off handsomely; optimizing at other places will not, no matter how good the optimization.

A good example of a constraint is the buffet line. I have a love/hate relationship with buffets. On the one hand, they offer a wide variety of different foods. You choose exactly what you want and how much. On the other hand, they are often extremely slow, especially if there is one single long buffet line. Next time you are in a long buffet line, notice where it moves slowest. It almost always moves slowest at the salad. It’s not uncommon to have people take leaves of lettuce or single tomatoes and put them on their plate one at a time. Even if they don’t, it just takes more time to assemble a salad than to grab a slice of fish or a roll.

In those cases, the salad is the constraint, the one area that makes the entire line go more slowly than it otherwise would. More than once, I’ve been at buffets with lines on either side but with only one pair of salad tongs for the lettuce, meaning the two sides must share one set of tongs. These areas are especially slow. In this case, simply adding another set of tongs will almost double the speed of the line! Ideally, a buffet will have a separate salad station, allowing the slow salad pickers to take their time while letting the rest of the buffet move more quickly.

My Operations class went beyond The Goal. Using various simulations, my professor demonstrated how a small, focused group could outperform a larger team and deliver higher quality and greater customization by considering the system as a whole, not just its parts. Often systems are bogged down by having too many people involved doing too many processes.

              The point is, before going to ‘improve’ the system by improving one of the parts, make sure that you fully understand the entire system and that you are improving the constraint.