I don’t think I shared this before … which is embarrassing 😳.

If you don’t know Rory Sutherland, but he’s one of my greatest influences.

He and I met a dozen years ago when I stalked him at a conference, and since then we’ve become good friends. He’s brilliant and quirky and funny, and he loves chatting more than I do!

Eli Goldratt changes the left-side of my brain, Rory Sutherland changed the right.

If you’d love to listen to us two chatting, along with Elfried Samba, who is one of the most followed people on LinkedIn, go here:

• Go here for the iTunes podcast link.

• Go here for the Spotify podcast link.

• Or here for the YouTube link.

A reflection …

On a personal note, I’ve had several messages in the last week from people who are kinda stuck but can’t afford to pay for consulting.

If that’s you too … message me, and I’ll do my best to help you, for no fee.

(I’ve been in your shoes, and good people have helped me. It’s how the world should work. Just hit reply …)

Clarke

p.s. that said, if you’re stuck, and you know it’s costing you a fortune … also hit reply. No bottleneck is too big nor small. No timezone is too far away.

You’ve read a lot about TOC — bottlenecks, critical chain, throughput accounting — but still don’t know where to start.

If that’s true, I’ve got something that actually works: the 6-Week TOC Sprint.

What’s the 6-Week TOC Sprint?

It’s a 90-minutes-a-week coaching sprint designed to help you untangle the mess, figure out where to focus, and get traction.

It’s not more TOC theory. And it’s not just diagnosis.

Every one of my clients has had good TOC knowledge before they hired me. They didn’t need more theory. They needed help turning it into practice inside a real business. That’s what this is.

Over six weeks, we work through your real business, and get you unstuck.

I don’t normally make sales pitches like this.

One of my projects has wrapped early, and my wife is away overseas for the month, so I’ve got more time in July than usual. This time of year, the time zones work well for people in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and Europe.

So if you’ve been circling TOC for a while, but the business still feels tangled, this is a good moment to ask: what would change if you knew exactly where to focus?

I don’t collect testimonials from clients but …

But if you’ve read my books, you’ve seen countless examples of my work.

And you know how it goes …

It usually looks like this:

A business is stuck and confused. There are symptoms everywhere: delays, firefighting, overloaded people, too many priorities, projects that should be finished but somehow keep dragging on.

We untangle the mess. We find the root cause. The situation becomes clearer. Then we make a few focused changes in the right place.

A few taps here. A few tweaks there.

And suddenly the pressure comes down and the business speeds up at the same time.

Everything is better.

Not perfect, of course. But better.

Stuff gets shipped (at long last). And often that is enough to push the business into being profitable.

It is a bit like a doctor starting with symptoms, finding the real problem, and then doing keyhole surgery.

Not a huge transformation program. Not a hundred initiatives.

A precise intervention where it matters.

This works whether you build software, develop products, run a factory making real things, run a gym, or lead a hospital.

The surface looks different every time.

Underneath, it’s all queues and clues. 🕵️‍♀️

I can only take a few of these in July.

The first session is free. But it’s not a sales call.

We start working.

We look at your business, the mess, the symptoms, the stuck projects, the overloaded people, the places where speed keeps disappearing.

Then we get busy untangling it.

By the end of that first session, you should have a clearer sense of what is going on, where the leverage point lurks, and whether it makes sense for us to keep working together.

If we both think there is something useful to do, we turn it into a paid 6-Week TOC Sprint.

If not, you still leave with more clarity than you came in with.

And that’s priceless - bad pun intended.

So … it’s just 90 minutes a week for six weeks to untangle the mess, find the leverage, and start getting traction.

If you’d like to chat, hit reply and tell me what’s on your mind.

Clarke

Happy Dad here!

Remember when I asked for help for my daughter, Aisling, who was moving to Edinburgh?

I got a bunch of responses - thank you so much ! - and she’s just received a job offer from a really cool, small consulting company.

And she’s loving Edinburgh - who wouldn’t!

Happy Mum. Happy Dad! Thank you Mark.

Rescheduled Webinar

A quick heads up: I’ve rescheduled my Cognitive Crush webinar.

It’s now 2 weeks later, at the same time of day:

• If you’re in NZ, AU, UK, EU it’s on Wednesday the 8th of July

• If you’re in the US it’s on Tuesday the 7th of July.

A reminder:

• It’s about how AI will mess with leaders’ and thinkers’ brains and workflows, and what you can do to get ahead of the inevitable changes.

• It’s not about prompts, agents, Siri, or using the AI technology.

• It’s about our biggest, cleverest brains being turned into bottlenecks … and how we turn that into an advantage.

If you’re not already registered: registration details here.

Podcast Interview

If you can’t wait … I did a podcast interview about Cognitive Crush a couple of months ago with Vasco Duarte on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast.

You can read about it and listen here.

I enjoyed the interview - I think you’ll hear that in my voice. Vasco is a very enthusiastic fellow and his energy was infectious. He also did a better write up than I could have, so the blog post is worth reading.

Hope life is treating you kindly.

Clarke

p.s. if you’ve got a project that’s doomed, or your team is too slow - maybe we should chat? Hit reply - operators are standing by.

Quick one - I got an overwhelmingly positive response re running this webinar so I’ve decided to run two sessions, in two weeks from now. You can register below.

Description: Something strange is happening to smart people.

AI keeps getting better at the easy stuff - summarising, drafting, analysing, responding. Which sounds great. Until you realise what that leaves behind.

The hard stuff. All of it. All the time.

And here’s the problem: your brain wasn’t built for a diet of pure hard problems. Neither was mine. When the easy work disappears, something I call Cognitive Crush kicks in - and it quietly degrades the quality of every decision you make.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and I want to talk it through with you.

It matters more than it sounds - especially if you think for a living.

Session 1 - NZ, AU & USA

90 minutes including discussion

Note: if you’re in the USA (🇺🇸) the session is on Tuesday; which is Wednesday for everyone else.

🇳🇿 Auckland / Wellington Wed 8 July, 11:00 AM (NZST)

🇦🇺 Sydney Wed 8 July, 9:00 AM (AEST)

🇺🇸 Los Angeles Tue 7 July, 4:00 PM (PDT) - the day before

🇺🇸 New York Tue 7 July, 7:00 PM (EDT) - the day before

👉 Register: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/WpBAgqWWSxmWuNcSRD1N_w

Session 2 - UK, EU & NZ/AU evening

90 minutes including discussion

🇳🇿 Auckland / Wellington Wed 8 July, 7:30 PM (NZST)

🇦🇺 Sydney Wed 8 July, 5:30 PM (AEST)

🇬🇧 London Wed 8 July, 8:30 AM (BST)

🇫🇷 Paris Wed 8 July, 9:30 AM (CEST)

👉 Register: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/8X_h1vORRlqCF7PrBMTEqA

Pick the session that works for you. Both are free. Same content, different timezone.

See you there. And … hit reply and say hello - I don’t bite!!!!

Clarke

p.s. Winter has just arrived here in NZ. Brrrr.

In 1999 I was working in Dublin, helping a telecoms company upgrade its accounting software. One morning their senior accountant, Sheila, asked me to run an urgent report, then came and sat at my desk to wait for it.

I can still see her face. Dark rings under her eyes. She’d been in the office since 5am, she said. She looked worn down and worn out - this wasn’t an overnight thing, she’d been like this for months.

While the report chugged along, she told me what was going on.

Her team of accountants paid the supplier invoices, and they were drowning. The company was building a fibre-optic network across Ireland, the invoices had exploded, and no matter how hard her team worked, they couldn’t keep up. Suppliers weren’t getting paid. Two days earlier, the biggest contractor had threatened to walk off the project.

Life, basically, sucked for everyone involved.

That would have been bad enough. But there was more going on.

The founder was quietly selling the company, and the sale price, she said, depended on that fibre-optic project succeeding. So far, the project looked good, but if word leaked that the vendors were walking off the project, the CEO would lose millions of pounds.

And her solution to all this?

Sacrifice.

She sacrificed her health - the 5am starts, the missed sleep.

She sacrificed her team - they spent their days getting yelled at by angry suppliers, and the good ones kept quitting.

She sacrificed the company’s money - recruiting more and more accountants for a department nobody wanted to join.

Sacrifice felt responsible. It looked like leadership. It looked like the only way. But it was making everything worse.

So, as we sat there waiting for the report to print off, I quietly asked her to walk me through how invoices got paid. She held up her hand and counted off five steps, one per finger. Then I asked roughly how many invoices each step could handle in a day.

• Step 1 - 200.

• Step 2 - 80.

• Step 3 - 50.

• Step 4 - 20.

• Step 5 - 10,000 (it was the automated batch run).

She saw it before I said a word. Her jaw nearly hit the floor.

Step 4 was the approvals step.

And only one person in the whole team was senior enough to do them.

Sheila.

Her.

She was the bottleneck - though I’m not sure if I used that word.

Her entire team was capped at 20 invoices a day.

And she was the “cap”.

She was spending most of her day consoling angry suppliers and interviewing replacements for the accounting staff who’d quit, instead of approving invoices.

The fix wasn’t a restructure. It wasn’t more headcount. It wasn’t a transformation programme. She locked herself in a meeting room and approved invoices - starting with the angriest, and most strategically important suppliers first, of course.

Three days later, every outstanding invoice was paid. The angry calls stopped. The contractors stayed. A week after that, she cancelled the recruitment - she realised that she didn’t need more people after all.

Our conversation took about fifteen minutes.

Though, to be honest with you: it wasn’t really fifteen minutes.

By then I’d been working alongside her team for two months. Quietly watching. Untangling the mess in my head. And - most importantly - earning enough trust that she’d sit down and actually talk to me.

The untangling looked kinda instant. It wasn’t.

I’ve spent the thirty years since then having versions of that conversation - with software teams, manufacturers, banks, and government departments - over and over again.

The details change, of course.

The pattern doesn’t:

• An overwhelmed team.

• A leader whose solution is sacrifice - their health, their evenings, their team’s goodwill, their budget.

• And a mess nobody inside can see clearly, because everyone’s so busy, stuck inside it.

Sacrifice seems virtuous, but it never works, long term.

Sacrifice is not a strategy.

Sacrifice is the villain of the story.

I spent years telling Sheila’s story in talks and workshops, then wrote it into my bestselling book, The Bottleneck Rules (though I disguised her name and called her Sinead).

I wrote it so people could have that fifteen-minute moment for themselves, and thousands have - they email me :).

But plenty of readers tell me they love the ideas - and still can’t find their bottleneck.

It’s not because they’re not smart. It’s because their mess is too tangled up. They’re standing inside it, the way Sheila was.

So here are two ways I can help. One free, one not.

The free one. I’ve turned the questions I asked Sheila (and hundreds of others) into something I call the Bottleneck Detective Prompt - a prompt that interviews you, the way I’d interview you, until your bottleneck shows itself.

You can grab it here: https://clarkeching.kit.com/bottleneck-detective-prompt.

For a lot of messes, that’s all you’ll need.

It’s disturbingly good.

The other one is for when the mess is bigger than a prompt - tangled across teams, costing real money, the thing you’ve stopped sleeping over.

It looks like this:

Six weeks, working directly with me, a few hours each week (like a personal trainer, where we share the heavy lifting). We untangle your mess, get clarity, identify the villain, and start cleaning it up in small, practical steps. There’s no huge transformation programme. No army of analysts. No forty-slide diagnosis PowerPoint deck.

Think of it as getting to base camp - you might still have a mountain to climb afterwards, but plenty of my clients discover that base camp was all they needed.

If that’s you, hit reply and tell me about your mess. (Yes, I’m in New Zealand. No, that’s not a problem - most of my clients aren’t.) I’ll tell you straight up whether six weeks with me would help. And if it wouldn’t, I’ll say so and point you at the free stuff instead.

Clarke

PS - When I sent my mum a draft of The Bottleneck Rules, her only comment was that I shouldn’t have written that Sinead looked tired, because it wasn’t a nice thing to say.

Sorry, Sheila. You did look tired.

You deserved better.

I thought to myself: huh. The technicians are doing PowerPoints? Why would electricians need to make slide decks?

A few moments later it clicked.

Power points.

The things on the wall where the power comes out.

Wall sockets.

One of the lovely things about being a bottleneck detective is that you don’t (usually) need to know what your clients do or how they do it. It’s hard to have “fresh eyes”if you do. Besides, they already know all about that sorta stuff.

Hope you have a lovely weekend. Hit reply and say hello - if you like!

Clarke

It was expensive. I hardly ever used it.

I don’t like the “pen.” It’s clunky. I’m not a pen-and-paper sort of person. I’m a keyboard-and-mouse sort of person. I took typing lessons in high school, on proper typewriters. I was 1 of 2 boys in a class of 30. (It was soooo scary). It was also one of the most useful classes I took.

So the Kindle just sat there. Unused.

BUT THEN … last week Amazon announced the newest, latest Kindle Scribe. Holly Carp ... it looks so cool. There’s a colour model. You can highlight things in colour! I desperately wanted one.

Then I remembered I’m not good with pens.

AND THEN SOMETHING WEIRD HAPPENED.

I went and found my old Kindle Scribe.

And did the weirdest thing.

I read a book on it.

Turns out it’s a fantastic reading device!

Who knew?

The screen lights up so you can read it in the dark. It’s big, so you can turn it sideways, and read it in landscape mode, with 2 columns. So good! And, for my 56-year-old-eyes, it’s so much easier to read, and to hold.

So, I’ve gone and done something weird: I’ve removed the pen, and the cover, and I’ve hidden them in a drawer.

I neutered it.

I’m going to use it at the thing it’s best at: reading books.

THIS POST ISN’T ABOUT THE KINDLE SCRIBE.

Did you notice how the shiny-new-thing blinded me to the boring-old-thing?

I thought I was old enough that I didn’t fall for that kind of stuff.

I’ve been thinking about this all week, because it’s exactly what happens in my kind of work.

And probably yours too.

We want the shiny.

But we need the boring.

People come to us with big problems.

So they - naturally - want big solutions.

• Ten consultants.

• A war room.

• Lots of bling on the walls.

Change you can see happening in front of your eyes!

That’s one kind of change, and it is real change.

It’s loud, it’s impressive, and it does genuinely change things.

But then, eventually, the consultants leave.

And the change just kinda sits there.

…

…

…

Unused.

Like my Kindle in a drawer.

The posters stay up.

The habits fade away.

I used to think that was how you changed things.

Because that was all I ever saw.

(This is an important aside - Why did I only ever see the loud shiny changes? It’s because I couldn’t see or hear the quiet ones. How could I?)

But then, one day, something extra weird happened.

I decided that I was an introvert, and I embraced it.

(My pronoun is shhhhh...)

I stopped doing loud change.

I started having quiet chats.

I didn’t have to sell new ideas by shouting and over-promising.

I just had to sit with people who were stuck.

Chat.

Draw a few diagrams.

Help them solve the real problem, bit by bit.

I pretend this kind of way is boring, but it’s not.

It’s like being a detective. All of my work is like working a crime, or investigating a mystery. It’s like untangling a riddle, or solving a puzzle. Sometimes I’m Sherlock, sometimes my clients are Sherlock and I play Watson.

DAFT RIGHT?

Yup, it took a shiny new Kindle to make me notice how good the old one was at the plain, boring job of being a book.

So here are 2 questions worth pondering, for your good self:

1. What are you known for?

2. And what are you actually good at?

They might not be the same thing.

And that would be good to know.

Ask Claude, or ChatGPT, or whatever robot you talk to.

Hey robot, what am I known for and what am I actually good at? Are they the same thing or different?

Or, if you still have real friends, ask one of them.

For me, the answer came back like this:

• I’m known for the “where” - bottlenecks and brains.

• But I’m best at the “how” - quietly causing change that sticks.

Which was an eye opener - I’d never thought about myself that way before.

But I can think of a few clients who have fancy job titles, and are defined by their “where” and “what” but the thing they’re really good at is something boring like caring or teaching or uplifting other people.

Let me know how you get on.

Clarke

p.s. And … most importantly … If your team is drowning in work, and you’d like some help digging your way out of the hole, email me at clarke@clarkeching.com.

I’m running the first outing of my band new Stop the Slop at the Top workshop in mid-June, … if there’s enough interest.

It’s about:

• How unharnessed AI will turn leaders stupid … unless they protect their organisations’ most valuable asset: their big, gnarly brains.

• Building a moat around those brains.

Their brains are, of course, the ultimate bottleneck.

Can you hit reply if you’d like to join in (and let me know your timezone)?

This is a free, live version of a workshop I’m preparing to run for clients — kinda of like how stand-up comedians refine their material in small comedy clubs.

(I’m not sure, yet, if I will share the recording.)

Clarke

p.s. please look at the picture ↓

• Find a duckling. Don’t fix it. Make it less bad.

Some background first. Their business is bottlenecked. Too much work, not enough money. Because they’re rushed, they cut corners without meaning to. The cut corners come back to bite them, and waste a load of capacity. That wasted capacity might be what bottlenecks them - we shall see.

I call these little problems “ducklings” - because it feels like the business is being nibbled to death by ducklings.

So back to the homework.

• Find a duckling. Don’t fix it. Just make it less bad. Maybe 10%, maybe 30%. Don’t try too hard.

It’s almost always waaaayyyyy easier to make something less bad than to fix it. And half as bad is usually more than good enough. Once something is good enough, there’s no need to keep making it better - move on.

Now imagine the homework becomes an ingrained habit.

You start noticing patterns. You get better at making things less bad. Your problem-noticing and problem-solving skills grow - they’re like muscles that grow when exercised. And pretty soon, you claw back enough capacity that you stop making ducklings in the first place.

Hope that helps.

If you’d like to discuss working together, email me at clarke@clarkeching.com. Hitting reply works.

Cheers for now, my friend,

Clarke

p.s. Find a duckling. Don’t fix it. Just make it less bad.

p.p.s. Thanks so much to everyone who’s tested my AI bottleneck detective prompt. The results have blown me away. I’m going to release it very soon. Leave a little dent in the universe, maybe.

I’ve built something special that I’m going to give away for free.

It’s not quite ready yet, but it’s close.

Before I release it properly, I need a few more people to beta test it on real situations.

The AI Bottleneck Detective.

It’s a Bottleneck Detective AI - a 7,000 word prompt you can talk to when you’re trying to find the bottleneck in your business, team, or project.

Or, since you know me: “Clarke in a Box”.

This move may be generous, sensible, or a very small act of professional self-sabotage(!) Possibly all three.

The idea came from a frustration I’ve had with The Theory of Constraints for decades.

• Over 8 million people have read *The Goal*, and lots of people understand the idea of bottlenecks.

• Far fewer can reliably find their own.

Some of them pay me, and people like me, for help.

But others learn about bottlenecks, try to find their bottleneck, and fail.

Then they give up.

They file “bottlenecks” away in their “too hard basket”.

And that sucks.

I am 99% convinced this is why ToC has never really taken off.

I’m sure you’ve experienced it: Step 1 - Find, or Identify, the bottleneck - looks so easy in the books, but is really rather tricky for most people in real life.

Most people can spot symptoms of bottlenecks: late work, idle people, too much demand, not enough demand, too many priorities, a team that feels permanently busy but strangely unproductive.

But very few people can find the root cause.

That’s what I wanted this prompt to help with.

• Not to teach you bottleneck theory.

• Not to give you a lecture about operations.

But to have a proper conversation with you and help you work out where the real bottleneck might be.

I’ve tested it on a bunch of my old client case studies, and it seems to work … very, very well.

It was 100x faster than me, which was annoying. And in one case, it found a bottleneck I had missed at the time, which was more than annoying.

That was the moment I thought: “Oh crap. This AI stuff might actually work.”

A few friends have started beta testing it already, and they’re finding it useful too, with similar Doh! moments. That’s encouraging, but I want to test it on more real situations before I share it more widely.

So I’m looking for a few more beta testers.

You’d need 10-30 minutes to use the prompt, then another 10 minutes to send me feedback.

It’ll help if you’re the boss of something - a business, team, department, or project.

And it doesn’t matter if your team has too much work, or not enough work.

Good bottleneck detectives handle both.

One practical note: you’ll need access to a decent AI tool. The cheap/free models will (ironically) choke.

If you have 30ish minutes spare, please, please, please hit reply and I’ll send you the prompt and a few simple instructions.

cheers, Clarke.

p.s.

My wife says I have too many gaps in my diary, and I’m starting to annoy her…

So, if you’d rather not DIY your bottleneck hunt, I’m wondering … should we do a little work together?

I have a new easy-start offer that has helped a bunch of clients find and fix their bottleneck quickly.

It’s low risk, with high returns:

• Six 1-hour “bottleneck detective” sessions.

• It only costs $4,500 usd, $6,000 aud, $7,500 nzd, €4,000, or £3,500 gbp.

It’s a surprisingly fun way to unblock your business 🕵️.

Hit reply or email me at clarke@clarkeching.com if you’d like to chat.

Some time in my late-thirties, shortly after I realised that being clever wasn’t much use if you couldn’t explain yourself, I bought Blair Warren’s very short, very expensive book: The One Sentence Persuasion Course - 27 Words to Make the World Do Your Bidding.

Twenty-seven words. Five moves:

• Encourage their dreams. Justify their failures. Allay their fears. Confirm their suspicions. Help them throw rocks at their enemies.

I read it and felt icky. 🤮

It sounded like a manipulation manual.

And, in the wrong hands, it absolutely is.

I put it aside and didn’t think about it for nearly twenty years.

In those twenty years, I worked with a lot of senior leaders. And I started noticing something I couldn’t quite name. Something about how the work actually worked, beyond the methods and the frameworks.

Then I stumbled on Warren’s book again, by accident. (Don’t tell anyone, but I was looking in my Kindle library for a book about writing sentences. Turns out I own twelve books with “sentence” in the title. Long story.)

I braced myself and re-read it.

And I felt a lot stupid.

Because the five moves Warren described were exactly what I’d been doing, naturally and instinctively, with the people I help. I’d become the person he was describing. But … thankfully … that icky feeling? It was gone.

Here’s what young me missed: the moves are ethically neutral. A con artist uses them to extract. A friend uses them to support. The moves don’t change. The intent does.

And the intent comes from one thing - caring whether the other person is okay.

I’m careful about who I work with. If I don’t genuinely care about the leader (or at least about the people who work or live with them), I find a way not to take the gig. Caring is cognitively expensive, and I manage my cognitive energy carefully.

Here’s the first secret, that I’m slowly starting to believe:

• Caring isn’t some soft thing wrapped around the work. It kinda IS the work.

There’s a second secret, and this one’s for you:

• You can’t think clearly until there’s a smile in your mind.

You can’t solve gnarly problems when you’re stumbling around staring at your feet, feeling stuck.

You can’t think clearly when you’ve been beaten down day after day, quarter after quarter.

You probably can’t even see that it’s happening.

But when someone genuinely encourages your dreams, justifies your failures, stands in the dark with you - that pressure releases.

The smile returns.

They lift you out of the fog, out of the mud. Turn the lights on. Not a lightbulb moment - just light. And - 💡 - you see the room differently.

So, anyway, … that’s why I dismissed Warren’s book in my thirties and use it every day in my fifties. The difference? Young me grew up.

One last thing. If you help people for a living, caring might be your superpower. Not because YOU solve THEIR problems, but because you lift them up so they can solve THEIR OWN.

Just don’t care so much it breaks you.

Hope this helps, hit reply, say hello!

Clarke

p.s. heads up … I might be moving this newsletter from Substack back to convertkit soon. Substack is starting to make me feel a bit ick 🤮.

Quick invite. Later this week I’m sitting down with Christine Lindstrom for a live chat on Zoom, about “How to Think Like a Physicist”.

I’d love you to join us live. There’s 1 session, on two dates:

Friday 8 May

• NZ - 11:30 AM

• Sydney - 9:30 AM

Thursday 7 May

• Paris - 1:30 AM

• London - 12:30 AM

• New York - 7:30 PM (Thursday)

• San Francisco - 4:30 PM (Thursday)

Register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/A7DGOlQpSY-pBMQ0tLCOig

Here’s the good stuff:

Christine is one of the most pragmatic and clever people I’ve worked with. She’s got a PhD in physics and a Master of Education. She was Associate Professor before she left academia about three years ago for the private sector.

Christine now leads a new approach to content within the “lead with content” initiative at WiseTech (Ian Larson talked this on the podcast a few years back). What she does sits in the Venn diagram between her two qualifications: she thinks like a physicist about how the world works, and like an educator about how people learn.

Did I mention how clever she is?

We will chat about science, how scientists think, and how they solve problems.

And then we’ll talk about what her team does:

• They systematically capture their business’s most important knowledge - then shares it.

• Capture once. Share thousands of times.

• Across thousands of staff.

It’s not just typing.

It isn’t even “writing” in the way most people mean it.

It’s information architecture.

It’s thinking carefully about how people process what they read, how they find information, how they layer understanding on top of understanding.

Most of it is non-obvious until someone shows you.

At the end, we’ll talk about AI. Because AI has made some parts of this radically easier - but only for teams who’ve already done the architectural work. Without the scaffolding, AI just produces faster slop.

Come along. Bring questions.

Clarke

p.s. Christine has promised to explain to me why we need to have two different dates, when there’s only one session.

Go grab your deerstalker and magnifying glass … it’s time to play bottleneck detective.

Let’s start with something that every good bottleneck detectives know: The cunning bottlenecks don’t just hide. They sit quietly inside your business, strangling it from the inside, while distracting everyone else by framing an innocent party.

That’s how they survive.

Civilians find the easy bottlenecks without a detective, of course. A queue, a backlog, a bit of your process that’s obviously slow. They spot them. They fix them. They move on.

But, every so often - usually when everyone’s busy fixing something and nothing’s actually getting better - someone like you or me needs to put on our detective hat, and carefully study the scene of the crime.

And what we’ll almost always find - when the bottleneck is good at hiding - is that it’s been busy framing an innocent party.

That’s how the sneakiest bottlenecks survive - by getting you to search in the wrong place.

The em-dash police.

Here’s an example that’s happening right now.

Everyone’s hunting em-dashes.

Em-dashes are “AI tells.” HR bans them. Writers strip them out. Teachers flag them. LinkedIn has become a bit of a punctuation courtroom.

(Funny thing: I pay my editors to put them in for me, but I co-write with AI, and I have to tell it to take them out!)

Don’t get me wrong. I do think the em-dash hunters are right to be worried. When people let AI write for them (rather than cowrite), they’re turning off the thinking part of their brain. The em-dashes are (or were) evidence of that.

Real evidence.

But they’re a distraction.

A misdemeanour.

And I think we’re facing much bigger crimes.

Think like a detective

Let’s go back to Bottleneck Bootcamp.

You know that when you speed up one part of your process, you risk creating a new bottleneck, or bottlenecks.

The bits that could previously keep up, suddenly can’t.

That’s what’s happening with AI.

AI makes some things faster. A lot faster.

And that - depending how pedantic you want to be about the wording - either creates new bottlenecks, or moves the bottleneck.

So the question isn’t “is AI bad for writing?”

The question is: where is the new bottleneck going to land?

The new bottleneck …

This is a bit of a logical leap - and the reason I’m writing so much is that I’m trying to simplify the problem until it’s clear.

The new bottleneck is going to be our leaders’ cognitive capacity.

Their thinking time. Their judgement.

Their brains are going to be overwhelmed with hard thinking, and some of them will explode.

🤯

In fact, you and I already know this bottleneck exists - leaders have always had limited judgement capacity, so, to be clear: AI isn’t creating it.

It’s just going to make things far, far worse.

Rubbing salt into the wound, so to speak.

Let me elaborate … with my favourite new analogy.

Tetris? Tetris!

A leader’s job is like playing Tetris. Work falls from the top - some pieces easy, some hard. Easy pieces are routine decisions, standard approvals. Hard pieces are judgement calls, ambiguous trade-offs, gnarly problems.

AI will soon get so good it clears the easy pieces quickly, brilliantly, almost invisibly.

But the hard pieces will keep falling, faster, and faster.

And as you will remember, from the old days when you played Tetris, here’s what kills you: it’s not the speed alone. It’s accumulation. The hard pieces stack up. Each one you can’t clear makes the next one harder to place. The board fills from the bottom while pieces keep falling from the top.

🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯

Tetricide

I’ve decided to call this Tetricide.

Like homicide, but it’s death by Tetris.

A neologism!

My new favourite word!

Think about it:

A CFO used to spend two hours a day on routine approvals. AI handles those now - brilliant. But the ambiguous calls still arrive. Only now there’s no recovery buffer. No easy wins to break up the hard thinking. Just one gnarly decision after another, all day. Judgement quietly degrades. Nobody notices because the easy stuff is faster than ever (yay!). And your CFO’s brain just keeps getting tireder and tireder.

It’s doom scrolling, but with dollar signs.

Ironically …

So, my job as a thinker and writer, is to make this stuff easy to understand.

I do that by finding the right metaphor for the problem.

And then I share my thinking … and I see if it makes sense … and if it’s sticky.

And right now, I am so close to the words, I can’t tell if they’re sticky or not.

As much as I hope this makes sense and has been helpful, I also hope I haven’t overwhelmed you with too much thinking all at once.

Can you hit reply, and let me know if this helps or hinders?

Hope you’re well,

Clarke

🕵️⏳🤯

1. Don’t forget - Webinar tomorrow!

If you’re in NZ, AU, UK or the EU … I’m launching Shaped For Speed, my stunningly useful new book, in exactly 24 hours from when this email hits your inbox

Time: Apr 16, 2026 09:00 PM Auckland, Wellington

https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/g-hOuK6SS5G9KRNyb7T_Lg#/registration

2. Add 1 ingredient to turn good leaders into great leaders

I just wrote this about Eisenhower and boring D-Day was for him. Go here. 1 minute.

(The secret ingredient? Time. He had time to think, of course. )

3. A cool review for Shaped For Speed

I didn’t promote Shaped for Speed when it first came out, so it got very few reviews, and I thought I’d done a bad job.

I told people about the book and it started getting reviews.

I like this one - read it and you’ll see why (the book is meant for software development intensive businesses).

Hope you are doing well. I’m feeling sleepy, so I’m off to bed. Hit reply!!!! Say hello!👋

Maybe see you on zoom tomorrow?

Clarke

Yes: Tom Clancy, my hero, was making stuff up about computers!

And that got me thinking ... what else he’d been making up? I’d trusted him on submarines and missile systems and CIA tradecraft and geopolitics - but the only reason I’d trusted him was because he sounded like he knew what he was talking about.

I didn’t know any better.

I call this the Clancy Trap.

And it’s one of the big issues I think about when I think about AI, and how clever people use it. Don’t get me wrong - I love using AI, and I love how it’s helped make me so much more productive, but sometimes it’s genuinely brilliant and sometimes it’s talking, um, bollocks.

The problem is ... which is which?

I keep coming back to a thinker I stumbled across when I did my MBA - a Canadian psychologist called Elliott Jaques. He developed something he called The Requisite Organisation, based on decades of studying how organisations actually work in the real world. His big idea somehow snuck into my brain and never escaped - I use it with my clients when they’re restructuring and hiring.

Jacques’ big idea?

It’s simple: the level you sit at in an organisation should match how far ahead - in time - you can think.

Think of your local supermarket:

• The checkout operator thinks in minutes.

• The store manager thinks in months.

• The CEO thinks in years.

And here’s where it links up with the Clancy Trap. Jaques said that each level can evaluate the work of the people below them, but probably not above them. The store manager knows if the roster works, but ask them to evaluate the CEO’s strategy and they’re lost - though they may still offer an opinion! It’s above their pay grade.

The hierarchy works for two reasons. People at each level can make good decisions within their time frame. And they can judge the work of the people below them. Take either of those away and the whole thing falls apart.

The uncomfortable bit

And here’s the uncomfortable bit: if you use AI to produce work above your pay grade, the people at that pay grade will see straight through it. You won’t know it’s shallow. They will. You will look like a dork.

Back to AI.

When we use AI, we’re delegating work to something else. And that’s good, when you can judge the response.

I’m sitting here too-ing and fro-ing (co-creating) with Claude, and it’s helping me write this (so far we’ve spent about 120 minutes on it, so it’s not always a fast process), and you’re reading my ideas, that I’ve fine tuned and improved with Claude’s help, using my judgement.

My judgement - I know when our work is good, and I know when it’s not.

But what if I asked Claude to write something about ... I don’t know ... submarines or missile systems or CIA tradecraft or geopolitics?

Stuff above my pay grade?

Or what if I got it to write a paper that would make Peter Drucker proud?

How would I know it’s good, or not?

I could ask it for a strategic analysis, or a financial model, or a paper that reads like someone much smarter than me wrote it.

It’d be no different to me at fifteen, reading my Tom Clancy, nodding along at the submarine bits.

The output might be brilliant. It might be bollocks. And the whole point of the Clancy Trap is that I wouldn’t know which.

This isn’t a new problem. We’ve always had it with confident, well-dressed people. Our System 1 brains - I wrote about this recently here - substitute the hard question “is this person competent?” with the easier question “do they look confident?”

We end up confusing confidence with competence.

It’s like our brain thinks that dressing someone up in a $3,000 suit adds 30 IQ points. It doesn’t, of course. But good luck convincing your System 1 of that.

(Over the years, I’ve developed a simple heuristic that I don’t trust well-dressed confident people as much as I trust scruffy, awkward people, and it helps. Both have to earn the trust.)

So what can a sensible, caring person do to avoid the Clancy Trap?

First - build a thinking habit

Keep reminding yourself that well-dressed ideas aren’t necessarily good ideas. AI output looks professional because it always looks professional - that’s it’s thing.

If it helps, memorise the name - “The Clancy Trap” - because naming something turns it into a real thing and make it easier to remember.

Second - pull out your red pen

when you’re using AI to think through hard stuff, ask yourself: could I red-pen what just came back? Could I spot where it’s shallow, or wrong, or where it just sounds right but isn’t? If you can’t, you’re in the Clancy Trap.

This is good, solid, System 2 thinking. You’re good at this, just make sure you do it!

Third - Ask the big question!

This is the big one - ask yourself whether you should be delegating this stuff upward at all.

Just because AI will have a go at anything doesn’t mean you should let it.

Sometimes the right answer is: this is above my pay grade, and getting a confident-sounding response doesn’t change that.

And finally ...

Don’t forget that you have got a boss, or a bosses boss, or access to other experts.

Go talk to them.

Hope you’re doing well!!!! Hope this helps.

In other news, I might be writing a book called Cleverer, Fasterer, Stupider, which is my bestest attempt to help leaders and their leadership teams adapt to the new AI era, from a ToC angle, in < 10,000 words. No prompts! No agents! Just a relentless focus on not doing this to their brains: 🤯.

Clarke

p.s. hit reply now! Say hi! 👋

• A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that a former client, Ben, was relocating to Edinburgh and asked if anyone knew of opportunities. Several of you reached out. He got a job!!! Thank you, soooo much!

Now I’m asking again, but this time it’s personal.

My 23-year-old daughter Ash (Aisling) is moving back to Scotland in three or four weeks.

And I’d love some help, helping her land with her feet on the ground

And here’s the thing - you’ve already seen her work.

You just didn’t know it.

Because she’s helped me write my books.

This is an important point: When Ben was looking for work, he’d done a talk with me, so you could watch that and see how clever and thoughtful he is. I kept wishing I had something like that for Ash - a way of showing you, not just telling you. But I kept bumping up against the same problem: she’s a recent Masters graduate and (forgive me dear daughter) no one really cares that she’s spent hundreds of hours writing a dissertation.

But then I realised I already had a way to show you how clever (and thoughtful) she is:

• She edited my last three books. Not just proofreading - proper developmental editing. She shaped ideas too. The aerodynamics stuff in Shaped for Speed? That came from two places: working with a parachute company, and Ash’s slightly obsessive love of F1.

And, also, if you’ve read Rolling Rocks Downhill, you’ve known her even longer than that. She was Ashley.

But the books were just the start. For the last three years she’s worked for me, part time. and I used to feel awkward saying that. It felt like saying “I hired my daughter” diminished what she actually does. Over three years, she grew into something I didn’t expect. She genuinely became my trusted adviser.

We talk 4 or 5 days each week about my work - not the logistics, but the real thinking. She gives me feedback I can’t get from anyone else. She’s commercially sharp in a way that surprises me given her age. She studied political science and criminology - not the policing side, but the systems side. How people interact within systems, why things break down, what you’d change to get better outcomes.

This stuff is surpassingly useful for me - the systems thinking, bottleneck detective!

I know this sounds like a proud dad talking. It is! But I’m also telling you as someone who’s been lucky enough to work with her every week for three years: whoever gets her is getting someone unusually good.

So I’m doing what dads do. I’m asking around.

(She knows I’m writing this, by the way. She wants to build her own life in Scotland, and she’s not precious about where she starts. She just wants to work, ideally somewhere she gets to use her brain.)

She’s been living in Cork the last while, near her aunts and uncles, so her LinkedIn still says Cork - but Scotland is the plan. If you want to put a face to the name, she’s here.

But honestly, this email tells you more about her than LinkedIn ever could.

I’m not asking you to employ her, but if you know someone in Edinburgh or Glasgow who might want to talk to a sharp, thoughtful person who understands systems and people - someone who could help with research, analysis, editorial work, or anything where clear thinking matters - I’d be really grateful if you’d pass her name along.

Just reply to this email and I’ll connect you.

Or connect to her directly on LinkedIn

And yes, I’m going to miss her. Losing your trusted adviser is its own kind of bottleneck. (Thankfully, I guess, I have 2 daughters - the other one is in her 3rd year of university, and was “Alison” in rolling rocks downhill.)

Clarke

The response surprised me. Not because people disagreed, but because of how many said “that’s exactly what’s happening to us right now.”

Lot’s of people.

So let me make it worse.

Because Cognitive Crush doesn’t just exhaust clever people.

It also degrades the quality of our decisions - silently, invisibly, in a way that nobody notices.

Two Brains are better than one

To explain why, I need to borrow from Daniel Kahneman, who you probably know from his book “Thinking, Fast and Slow.”

(And, if you’re anything like me, you love the book but haven’t actually finished reading it.)

Kahneman describes how your brain (and mine!) runs two very different thinking systems.

System 1 is fast, automatic, and always on. It’s the part that reads emotions on a face, completes the phrase “bread and ___,” and gives you a gut feeling about whether a project is on track. It operates without effort. You don’t choose to use it. It just runs.

System 2 is slow, deliberate, and effortful. It’s where you do the hard thinking - weighing trade-offs, questioning assumptions, doing the maths on whether a plan actually adds up. System 2 feels like the “real you.” The careful, rational one.

Here’s the first problem: System 2 is so, so, so lazy.

That’s not an insult - it’s a design feature. Hard thinking burns through real, measurable energy, and our brains have evolved to conserve energy. Kahneman’s research showed your pupils physically dilate when System 2 is working hard. Your body literally strains under the effort. It uses so much energy and it makes you tired. So your brain rations it. System 2 only kicks in when it absolutely has to.

The rest of the time? System 1 runs the show. And much of the time System 2 - the part that’s supposed to check the work - just rubber-stamps whatever System 1 delivers.

This works fine most of the time. System 1 is fast and usually good enough.

Usually... eek!

Here’s the second problem: System 1 is sneaky, confident and makes stuff up.

When System 1 hits a hard question, it doesn’t stop and wait for System 2 to show up. It does something sneaky. It swaps the hard question for an easier one - and answers that instead. Without telling you.

Kahneman calls this “question substitution.” You won’t notice it happening. You’ll just feel like you know the answer, and that the answer is good.

“Is this feature going to deliver the outcome we promised?” is a hard question. “Do I trust the person who proposed it?” is an easy one. System 1 will quietly swap the second for the first and hand you a confident answer that has nothing to do with the actual question.

“Should we cut this from the roadmap?” is hard. “Will cutting it create an uncomfortable conversation that I’d rather avoid?” is easy. Guess which one your brain actually answers.

And here’s the really unsettling part.

System 1 doesn’t just give you a guess. It gives you a feeling of knowing. You walk away from these substituted answers with genuine confidence - because they feel right. You don’t feel like you cut corners. You feel like you made a good decision.

(I’m sure you know this feeling - the same sort of thing happens when a confident-but-thick person tells you something and you believe them because they seem confident.)

Now let me see if I can put this together with Cognitive Crush.

AI tools have just replaced a huge chunk of your leadership team’s routine work with concentrated decision-making.

The easy stuff (that used to be hard and time consuming) is now largely automated.

What’s left?

The hard stuff - the trade-offs, the priorities, the judgment calls.

That’s all System 2 work. And System 2 has a fixed, limited budget.

And you’ve got too much thinking to do ... and the System 2 budget has run out.

Arrhghghghghghgh …

So what happens when that budget runs out?

System 1 takes over.

Not dramatically - nobody suddenly becomes stupid. It’s subtle. Leaders start going with their gut on things that need analysis. They approve plans that feel right without checking the numbers. They substitute easy questions for hard ones - “Does this deck look polished?” instead of “Does this strategy actually hold together?” - and they don’t notice the swap.

(System 2 is supposed to notice, but it’s having a nap remember 💤💤💤)

Cognitive Crush doesn’t make people visibly bad at their jobs.

It makes them invisibly worse.

They still feel confident.
They still make decisions quickly.
From the outside, everything looks fine.

But the thinking gets shallower. The hard questions - the ones that actually matter - quietly stop getting asked. And everyone’s brain is too busy to notice.

It spreads like a virus …

Because when System 2 is depleted across your whole leadership team, you don’t get one bad decision. You get a slow, organisation-wide drift toward shallow thinking. Every leader, every day, burning through their cognitive budget faster than they can replenish it - and backfilling with gut instinct dressed up as judgment.

And nobody raises the alarm, because everyone feels fine.

System 1 is very good at feeling confident.

System 2 is too busy to notice.

One of the joys of my life is that I get to work with a lot of very clever people. And if I had to sum up the problem in one sentence, it would be this: they don’t have enough time to think slowly, and carefully.

Gut thinking - System 1 - is absolutely brilliant. It’s fast, it’s experienced, and most of the time it’s right.

But if you don’t complement it with System 2 - the slow, careful, effortful thinking - you end up doing stupid things that look brilliant.

And that’s the most dangerous kind of stupid, because nobody catches it.

---

So what can we do about it?

We need to start treating cognitive energy like the precious, finite resource it is. You treat it like the bottleneck. Because that’s what it is.

If you’ve read my books, you’ll recognise the FOCCCUS Formula here. We’ve done the hard part already - we’ve found the bottleneck. It’s the cognitive capacity of the people making your most consequential decisions.

Now you need to protect it - which is how we optimise it (the O in FOCCCUS).

That starts with rest. Not as a wellness initiative - as an operational necessity. System 2 replenishes when it gets downtime. If your leaders are sprinting from decision to decision all day, you’re running your most valuable resource at 100% utilisation. And we know how that ends.

Then you slow the flow. Space out the decisions. Protect thinking time in the diary. Stop treating a packed calendar as a sign of importance and start treating it as a sign that your bottleneck is overloaded.

Then you offload. Not everything requires the leader’s brain. Delegate the decisions that don’t need System 2 - and be honest about which ones those are. You can delegate to colleagues, consultants, and - yes - AI. Most leaders hold onto far more than they need to.

And then - most importantly - you curate.

Be ruthless about which decisions actually deserve your best thinking and which ones don’t warrant a minute of that precious capacity. Right now, in most organisations, leaders are burning their best thinking on decisions that don’t matter - while the ones that actually matter get whatever’s left over. Which, increasingly, is System 1 on autopilot.

The bottom line …

You can’t solve a brain bottleneck by feeding it faster. You solve it by making space for the hard thinking to actually happen. On the decisions where it matters most.

TLDR: Protect your brainy bottleneck!

I really hope that helps.

Clarke - who loves it when you hit reply and so hello or ask a question!

p.s. I wrapped up with a client a couple of weeks ago. They make real stuff and we got a 23% increase in revenue, over 3 months, and it all came from a bunch of well spaced dedicated thinking time. So, what I’ve written above works … and I have room to take on one more client. Hit reply if you’d like to chat.

I suspect you might like to read this LinkedIn post - and, at the same time, maybe you could help me untangle a little mystery?

That post went viral.

Twice!

The first time it got 95k views, which was nice, but I DON’T KNOW WHY.

It had a nice graphic:

And, the actual writing is pretty decent too - read it here.

But … I only share stuff that I think is “pretty decent”, and it didn’t expect it to be treated any differently.

So, bored one day, I posted it again, a few months later, as an experiment.

Would it do well the second time?

(Sorry for the spoiling above)

YES IT DID.

This time: 44k views.

Normally, I get between 500 and 5,000 views on my posts.

So, clearly, there was something special about this one.

But what was it?

I don’t know.

There were very few comments. Some reposts. And thousands of views.

Could it just be the graphic?

It’s fresh in your head now. Any thoughts?

Clarke

p.s. I don’t count my followers, but coincidentally, I was watching the number closely when this post went viral. I had 9,997 followers and I was looking forward to it ticking over to 10,000.

After it went viral I had 10,008 followers. Ugh.

11 new followers.

Linkedin in is weird.

I’m feeling spontaneous and I’m running a free webinar this Thursday.

It’s called Clarke Ching’s Making More Money Masterclass (for when your business isn’t making enough money).

Snappy, right!

It’s this Thursday 26th March, 1pm NZT. (Exactly 3 days from the time this email hit your inbox).

Here’s the idea:

• Almost every business that isn’t making enough money has the same four problems.

• They look different on the surface - different industries, different sizes, different excuses - but underneath, it’s the same four patterns choking the flow of money through your business.

• When you see them, you can solve them.

I’ll show you all four. No frameworks, no methodology, no jargon. Just a way of looking at your business that makes you go “oh... THAT’S where the money’s going.”

And I’ll give you two questions you can ask yourself and your colleagues on Friday morning that will show you exactly where to start.

This is the same stuff I use with clients, but simplified to get you started. (It’s actually very advanced ToC thinking, but for beginners.)

If you reckon your business should be making more money - and you suspect the answer isn’t “just work harder” - come along.

It’s free. It’s Thursday. Bring a pen.

Register here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/TXkb-XHSRZqfCHkHGNRGWg

Talk soon,

Clarke

P.S. I’ll run a separate session for European time zones if there’s enough interest. Reply to this email if that’s you and I’ll make it happen.

I was on a podcast this morning, talking about The SPEED Book, when the host said, “Love the subtitle, Shaped for Speed” and I said, “Yeah, I shoulda named the book that.”

And then I made a Doh! sound.

Because that’s actually what the book is about:

1. SHAPING your business.

2. For SPEED.

Aerodynamics not horsepower.

🙇🙇🙇

An hour later, after the call, I started second-guessed my second-guessing, and decided to do something this 56 year old man hates doing.

Asking for help.

So, “help”: what’s best:

A - “The SPEED Book - Shaped for Speed” or

B - “Shaped for Speed - Aerodynamics not Horsepower”?

If you’ve got 10 seconds, can you hit reply, type “A” or “B”, then hit send?

(And we need never discuss this, my moment of weakness, again.)

Help a friend of mine

Remember the webinar I did last year with my friend and former client, Ben Eagle?

We talked about the work he and his colleague, Hugo, did running my Motorcade Method through their product development team? They cut their project's’ lead times massively, and shipped 4x as many new products, by very cleverly doing less.

Ben’s moving to the UK (probably Edinburgh) in a couple of months, along with his partner. They’re both engineers.

He is a genuinely clever, thoughtful guy, and I’d like to see if I can help them find a job (or, at least contacts) in the UK.

You probably don’t know anyone who will employ Ben, but you might know someone who knows someone?

Here’s his LinkedIn profile - he is a Product Development Engineer, and also a genuinely good manager.

You can rewatch the talk here, which will tell you far more about him than I can:

If you can help, ping him a message on Linkedin.

Clarke