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

It’s a fun read. He’s a good guy.

I am not David Pogue!

I’ve published six books now, and my approach to launching them has been, to put it generously, relaxed.

When Rolling Rocks Downhill came out over ten years ago, I pushed publish and more or less wandered off. The book did rather well despite me - possibly because I’d been sharing chunks of it on my blog for years, and possibly because the Agile world was kind to it. Either way, I didn’t exactly hustle.

A couple of months later, Ali, my friend and boss - who appears, cunningly disguised, as Alfonso in two of my other books - asked if I was going to have a little celebration. I said no. He said he thought we should. So we went for dinner, a dozen or so of us, and it was warm and genuinely lovely. Not commercial at all. Just: you finished a thing, let’s mark it. (Truthfully: it was one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me.)

Then a while later, visiting my wife’s family in Ireland, we were sitting down to a huge roast lunch when my brother-in-law said, “By the way, congraulations to Clarke - he’s just finished writing a book.” I had completely forgotten to mention it. They did a little toast.

Those two moments are the ones I still remember. Both accidental. Neither engineered.

There was one proper launch event, when I moved back to New Zealand.

About a hundred people came to an Agile Wellington evening, and I gave everyone a free copy of The Bottleneck Rules. T

hen I sat at the front and signed all eighty-odd of them, one by one, while the queue snaked around the room. I’d planned it that way deliberately - a live bottleneck demonstration, right there in the room. I was the bottleneck, everyone could see it, and there was absolutely nothing to be done about it except wait.

I loved every minute of it tbh. Giving things away and talking about ideas in a room full of people - that part I’m genuinely good at.

Promotion in the David Pogue sense? Not so much. I admire him enormously. We’re wired differently.

(checks notes … where were we?)

Anyway. The SPEED Book is out.

If you’d like a copy, you can get the Kindle, paperback, or hardback here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DQHKN5XZ

Or just hit reply and I’ll send you the PDF version.

If you do read it and like it and felt like doing me a favour - a review on Amazon would really help. People don’t leave as many reviews as they used to 10 years ago and they matter more than most people realise. Especially to the author.

Hope you are doing well. I enjoyed writing this. I’ve just decided I’m going to copy David Pogue’s email strategy and post on the same topics he does. Yesterday he wrote about the cover. Next up, I’m going to write about my cover (and why I had to rewrite the book after I saw it 🤦.)

Clarke

Guess what?

• You know how I launched The SPEED Book in January. Quietly. No fanfare. Got sick! Never followed up.

• This April, I’m doing it properly.

I’m running two live HOW-TO webinars - both are good for NZ and Australia and the US, and one is good of the UK, Ireland, and Europe. (see below)

Register and I’ll send you the PDF for free. It’s a 60-90 minute read, and I’d love it if you read it before we meet.

Here’s what the book is about:

Most software teams are slow for one reason: they’re the wrong shape.

Not the wrong people, not the wrong tools.

The shape.

The book teaches you how to fix that - how to reshape your teams so they run faster, calmer, and in the right direction.

Think “aerodynamics”, not “horsepower”.

It’s jargon-free Bottleneck Thinking - the most advanced stuff I’ve ever put on paper, but stripped down and simplified so completely that you’ll think you already knew it.

The webinar is for Product Leaders, CTOs, CIOs, and Agile Leaders.

And, frankly, CFOs who spent a fortune on Agile and Digital Transformation and still can’t work out why their teams feel so sluggish.

The Details:

Register below, zoom will send me a copy of the registration email, and I’ll send you a pdf copy of the book.

Session 1 - Americas & Australia and New Zealand

⋅ San Francisco - Wednesday 8 April, 4pm

⋅ New York - Wednesday 8 April, 7pm

⋅ Sydney - Thursday 9 April, 9am

⋅ New Zealand - Thursday 9 April, 11am

https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/2ydMPwmoTFikp-eoK0PAIA

Session 2 - Europe & Australia and New Zealand

⋅ Edinburgh - Thursday 16 April, 10am

⋅ Paris - Thursday 16 April, 11am

⋅ Sydney - Thursday 16 April, 7pm

⋅ New Zealand - Thursday 16 April, 9pm

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

Please come along, if you can. It’ll be genuinely useful - for you and for the people you work with. Good for your stress levels; good for your bank balance.

And, it’d be so nice for me to see your smiling face :)

Clarke

It’s a tiny little book. Five minutes to read. My version of Who Moved My Cheese, but (seriously) less cheesy. Or Our Iceberg Is Melting, but with a warmer heart.

It’s called Squished!

It’s about Harold, a hermit crab who’s shell has grown too tight (because he’s grown):

A kids’ book for grown-ups.

It’s about growth and growing up. What to do when you’re stuck. And why your comfort zone should really be called your discomfort zone.

I use it in my work with some very grown up people. And it turns out they read it to their kids

You can read it (free) here: unsquish.me

I would so, so love your feedback, since I have a problem:

• Every other book I’ve written has been successfully self-published, but this one feels different.

• Based on early feedback, I’m considering approaching a traditional publisher.

• I don’t know how to do that.

I must admit I feel a little nervous even asking, but: thoughts? Suggestions?

Clarke - feeling atypically nervous.

Norman didn’t exist six weeks ago. He has no LinkedIn profile. He’s never been on a company org chart. And - thankfully - he’s not AI.

But Norman is the reason a manufacturing company I worked with just “outperformed the other three businesses in their group” in January.

Which hasn’t happened before. A month earlier, they’d called me because things weren’t looking too good. Orders stuck for months. Nothing shipping. Cash getting tight. Good people working hard and getting nowhere. Not fatal, but bad enough to ask for help.

They’re now headed for profit in February and March too.

Here’s what happened.

I ran my Motorcade Method with them.

You know the drill: find the most important project or order, treat it like a presidential motorcade, and clear every obstacle in its path. Simple in theory. Remarkable in practice.

We found the order. Then we asked the only question that matters: what’s actually stopping this from shipping?

The answer: Raw material shortages. Every damned time. The order would get moving, hit a missing component, and stall. And then they’d start another order instead of fixing the problem.

So we invented Norman.

Norman the Storeman. An existing employee, temporarily reassigned to one job: find what components were missing, order them, and do it fast - even though cash was tight and fast delivery was expensive.

That first VIP order shipped. The cash register rang. Then they did it again. And again.

The magic with the MotorCade method is that every run of the motorcade finds new obstacles and clears them, often permanently. The whole place speds up.

Here’s the bit you’ll love: This took us 6 hours on Zoom, spread over two weeks.

This is why we love Theory of Constraints and bottleneck thinking so much, right?

The solutions ToC surfaces are almost always retrospectively obvious - you see them and think “why didn’t we just do that sooner?” And sometimes you feel a little silly.

Doh.

But that’s the point. You don’t need a complicated solution. You just need the right solution. And the Motorcade Method flushes it out. It tells you where to focus. It gives you permission to invent imaginary new staff and roles (when that’s what it takes).

Norman was obvious - once we knew where to look.

The hardest bit? Was realising that it was good business to pay DHL extra money for fast delivery. The good news, that was a temporary fix, and they can switch back to cheaper shipping once the system stabilises.

How cool is that? Hope it helps make this stuff a little more concrete.

—

cheers for now,

Clarke - who loves it when you hit reply and say hello!

p.s. if you found yesterdays post about AI and “Cognitive Crush” especially interesting, take a quick peak at the comments in the LinkedIn version.

Apologies … It’s a been a while. I published The SPEED Book in January, and I promised to tell you more about it, and then … I had a wee hospital visit and some recovery. Sorry about that - I’m all good now.

I will share more about The SPEED Book, and the other book I wrote while I was recovering(!), very soon. Promise.

But today I want to share a very important “Bottleneck Guy Insight” that will help you look very clever … if your business is currently investing in AI coding tools, like Claude Code.

Because … guess what?

AI is going to really mess things up, if you’re NOT bottleneck savvy.

It’s taken me ages to find the words to say this, so if you have a few minutes it’d help me loads to know if the words resonate or not.

clarke@clarkeching.com

Cognitive Crush - a mini-essay

→ AI just made your developers twice as fast. Congratulations - you’ve created a brand new bottleneck.

Here’s what’s happening in company after company right now. Engineering teams adopt AI coding tools - Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor, pick your flavour - and developers speed up. Significantly. That part works.

But faster code means more decisions needed, faster. More features to prioritise. More designs to review. More trade-offs to evaluate. More ideas to say no to. All of that lands on your product managers, designers, and leaders.

The obvious fix? Give your product people AI tools too. Speed them up the same way you sped up engineering.

It helps. But it almost makes things worse. Because AI doesn’t just speed up their work - it multiplies the volume of options, analysis, and insights their brains have to juggle. Work that used to be spread across weeks is now compressed into days, if not hours.

I’ve decided to call this “Cognitive Crush” - the cumulative weight of all that AI-accelerated thinking, pressing down on the humans who have to absorb it. It’s not one big thing. It’s a thousand useful things, each one adding weight, until something gives.

Our dog trainer taught us something useful: if you want to exhaust the dog, don’t run them around the park - make them play brain games instead. Hide treats, make them solve problems. They’ll sleep for hours.

It’s the same with people.

Hard thinking is massively more exhausting than other work. And AI has just replaced a huge chunk of your product team’s work with pure, concentrated decision-making. Hour after hour. Day after day.

It’s like going from driving on quiet country roads to navigating a busy city. Same distance. Same car. But the cognitive load per kilometre is through the roof. You arrive exhausted, and you’re not sure why.

You can’t solve a brain bottleneck by throwing more AI at it. More AI just feeds it. Makes it worse.

The leaders who’ll navigate this well will start the same way you solve any bottleneck problem.

Step one: find it. And right now, for a lot of companies, it’s not where they think it is. It’s not in the codebase. It’s inside the heads of the people who have to think, decide, and prioritise.

Step two: manage it carefully. Which in this case means managing cognitive energy like the precious, finite resource it is.

Find then manage - this is my FOCCCUS formula, right?

The short version is: don’t make people’s brains explode.

Hope that helps.

That’s going up on LinkedIn this evening (but with fewer incomplete sentences, because LinkedIn seems to like those.)

Hope you’re doing well. Why not hit reply and tell me what’s up?

I really do like that :)

Clarke

Two things:

1 -“The SPEED Book” - is out now!

My new book launched last week.

It’s my owners manual for the aerodynamic organisation.

Aerodynamic?

• Think of a bus versus a racing car.

• One fights the air, one flows through it.

Most organisations are shaped like buses.

You can buy it on amazon.com or amazon.com.au or amazon.co.uk.

Inconveniently, I had an unplanned hospital trip on the same day the book came out, so I couldn’t share earlier. (I’m fine now, but a bit exhausted still.)

More to come (on the book) soon.

2 - Yay - The Humble Pie Webinar!!!!

I’ve finally uploaded the recording. This is where I untangle how I actually help leaders hit aggressive deadlines - the thinking behind the methods.

You can watch the full thing on YouTube or here on Substack:

Or, Even better: wait a few days for the highlights, which I’ll share over the coming weeks.

That’s it. Short one this week. More on the new book(s)1 soon.

cheers, Clarke

I’ve been thinking about what to write to you, and I decided to just tell you something true about where I’ve landed.

I hope you find it useful - especially if you’re good at coming up with clever ideas, but struggle to get others to use them.

Here it is: I’ve realised I’m actually very good at something I spent years thinking I was bad at.

Let me explain.

The detective part

For a long time I thought of myself as a Theory of Constraints beginner. An apprentice. I was learning this stuff, and sharing what I learned as I went.

But over 15 years or so of doing that - studying, applying, writing, teaching - I slowly built up the confidence to call myself the bottleneck guy. To trust that I really did know this stuff. That I wasn’t just borrowing other people’s ideas anymore.

And that part - the detective work - did come naturally to me. Solving problems. Especially big-picture problems. The kind where you ask: what’s strangling this business?

Finding the bottleneck was never the hard part.

The other half

But there’s another half to this work. The part where you actually help people make the change. And that didn’t come naturally at all.

Let’s roll back to the early 2000s.

I’d just moved to Scotland. I left behind whatever credibility I’d built in New Zealand and started fresh. And I realised, pretty quickly, that I lacked a lot of what people called “soft skills”.

I was awkward. Rough round the edges. Clever, but clumsy with people. With a kind and generous heart, I like to think - but without the skills or the credibility, in a new country, to help anyone see the solutions I could so clearly see.

I’d like to say I had a deliberate plan. I didn’t. I was making it up as I went along. But I started filling in the gaps - the soft skills others seemed to be born with, but I was missing. I kept learning the hard stuff too, of course. Theory of Constraints, Agile, all of that. But I began paying attention to the other side. Learning how to help people. Learning how to help them cause the change.

(Some of it came from surprising places. When I wrote my business novel, Rolling Rocks Downhill, I had to learn how to write dialogue. And completely unexpectedly, that skill transferred. These days, when I’m coaching or mentoring, I often end up writing dialogue on the fly - helping clients find the right words so they can say the right things. It’s a strange skill to have. But it turns out to be shockingly useful.)

And somewhere along the way, without quite noticing, I got good at it. Good at causing the change. And helping others do it when I wasn’t there.

The weird bit: Despite loads of evidence that I’m especially good at working with people, a huge part of my brain still thinks it’s living in the early 2000s. Not fitting in. Standing out for being clever, but socially clumsy.

One of the reasons I’m sharing this admission, is that by writing it out in black in white, I’m convinced my brain will start to believe it.

The wall

These days I mostly work with leaders. CEOs, founders, senior managers. Not because I got bored of teams - I loved that work - but because I noticed something.

There’s a wall.

Teams can make many improvements on their own. But eventually they hit a point where they need leaders to make changes. And they can’t get through. They’re standing on one side of the wall.

What surprised me is that leaders are standing on the other side of the same wall, looking at it, not knowing quite what to do about it.

They want to make changes too. But they don’t know how to do so safely. They’re worried about resistance, politics, chaos.

I found myself drawn to that side of the wall.

It turns out that the soft stuff is so much more fun! Yes, playing bottleneck detective is thrilling. But then guiding people to do the slower work of earning trust, bringing people along, have the hard conversations … that makes me buzz. I don't have the words to describe how much fun it is, of all of us.

Why I think I’m good at it NOW

It’s precisely because I wasn’t always good at it.

My former awkwardness - and my need to overcome it - gave me an angle that more polished consultants never had to develop. They fit easily into the traditional role. I had to figure it out the hard way.

Here’s a parallel. If you wanted to lose weight and keep it off, whose advice would you trust?

• Probably not the naturally skinny person who never struggled, (and thinks they’re skinny because they’re morally superior to you!)

• No, you’d want someone who’d been there. Who understood the struggle from the inside. They know something the skinny person doesn’t1.

That’s how I think about my work now. I’m not the naturally polished consultant. I’m the one who had to learn how to cause change - because it didn’t come easily.

Two things, then

1 - Finding the bottleneck, and then,

2 - The slow work - earning trust, bringing people along, helping the change happen without triggering the immune system.

It took me a long time and a lot of evidence to realise I’ve gotten good at both.

So that’s where I’ve landed in my head. Thought you should know. Hope this is useful, and that it doesn’t sound like I’m bragging (about being incompetent for much of my career 😬).

A question for you:

• Has your brain caught up with who you've become?

• Or, is it still stuck somewhere in the past?

These realisations can be painfully slow.

The passage of time changes us.
But noticing it?
That sometimes takes years.

Happy New Year.

Clarke - who’d just love it if you hit reply and said hello!

Have you noticed that LinkedIn will happily bury your most useful posts, but the moment you change your job title it shouts it from the rooftops like your most embarsssing, but favourite, aunt at graduation?

So I wondered… could I outwit LinkedIn?

Could I create a temporary new role - something fun, something real - and let LinkedIn broadcast it far wider than any normal post?

Turns out… yes. Yes I can:

My wife and kids are overseas, visiting Ireland, for 4 weeks, starting this Saturday.

I’m home alone with the dog, 3 beautiful beach, an e-bike, and a calendar that goes very, very quiet as all my clients disappear for their holidays.

I’m not the type to sit still.

So instead of letting the month drift by, I’ve opened a Pop-Up Bottleneck Shop.

A one-month-only, holiday gig!

And I’m hoping I can use LinkedIn to “advertise” it.

These won’t be long engagements. They won’t be big transformations.

Just short, sharp bursts of help to speed things up in your business:

• Untangle an expensive, gnarly business problem that only fresh eyes can see .

• Get a critical project moving again (or better, setting it up to succeed).

• Finding and fix the hidden bottleneck that’s slowing everything else down.

You get me, focused, during the quietest work month of the year.

I won’t work Christmas Day, Boxing Day, or weekends, but the rest is wide open.

NZ, AU, Asia, and the Americas fit neatly with my daylight hours.

Europe works too - your morning is my evening.

My wife jokes that I enjoy my work so much I’m basically on holiday 365 days a year.

So I figured: why not make it useful?

If you want a slot, reply to this email or message me on LinkedIn.

There won’t be many, because … 🏖️,🚴, & 🐶.

(Oh yeah, and I’m supposed to be writing a book too 😜)

— Clarke

You’ve learned more about bottlenecks from Billy than most business experts learn in years.

While traditional books might bury these lessons in hundreds of pages about 1980s factory floors, I’ve focused on what matters today—practical tools you can use anywhere, from hospitals to tech teams, from charities to coffee shops.

Now let’s wrap up with a quick look at the FOCCCUS formula—your detective’s toolkit for solving bottleneck mysteries wherever you find them.

Find

This is where your detective work begins! Look for the bottleneck by following the clues—usually queues or piles of waiting work. As our young detective Billy loves to say: “The Queue is the Clue!” And you know what? He’s absolutely right.

Optimize

Once you’ve caught your bottleneck, it’s time to help it perform better without breaking the bank. Here’s some great news: Before people know about bottlenecks, they often haven’t paid special attention to these critical resources—which means there’s usually lots of valuable low-hanging fruit just waiting to be picked! Maybe your bottleneck needs fewer distractions, smoother processes, some friendly on-the-job training, or just a few clever tweaks. It’s amazing how often tiny changes can make a huge difference.

Coordinate

Here’s where you get everything dancing to the same rhythm as your bottleneck. Picture a naval fleet moving in perfect sync with their flagship aircraft carrier—beautiful, right? Sometimes this means deliberately slowing things down (I know, sounds crazy!) to prevent outpacing your bottleneck. Smart moves like getting the kids to put their shoes on before you’re ready to leave (not when you’re already late), or how clever airports do passport checks at departure instead of arrival. Small changes, big impact!

Collaborate

This, truly, is where the most magic happens! Get your non-bottleneck resources helping out the bottleneck. They’ve got spare capacity, so put it to good use!

Think about it: Often this is the first time the bottlenecks and non-bottlenecks have had a proper chat about how they work together—and you wouldn’t believe the quick wins just sitting there waiting to be discovered. And here’s another delightful secret: Two (or more) brains working together are usually far, far cleverer than one working alone. It’s like having a detective partner—everything gets easier!

Curate

Channel your inner museum curator and be choosy about what goes through your bottleneck. Prioritize, find alternatives, and—here’s your new superpower—learn to say “no” nicely. Trust me, protecting your bottleneck from overwhelm is an art worth mastering.

Upgrade

Yes, spending money can be absolutely brilliant—it’s just not usually your first move.

After you’ve done your detective work and tried the steps above, smart spending can transform your bottleneck. New equipment? Extra staff? Better facilities? Go for it! The key is spending wisely once you understand what’s really needed.

Start Again (Strategically)

Bottlenecks are sneaky—they tend to move when you make changes or when the world shifts around you. Sometimes it can feel like playing whack-a-mole—fix one bottleneck and another pops up somewhere else! Sometimes you’ll need to improve performance where the bottleneck is now, other times you’ll want to guide it to a better spot. (Think about it: In a cinema, you want your bottleneck to be the number of seats, not the speed of the popcorn machine!) When your bottleneck moves, just dust off your detective hat and start again.

Remember:

• Use these steps as inspiration, but let your common sense be your guide.

• Sometimes you’ll need all the steps, sometimes just a few. The goal is making things work better, not winning a formula-following competition!

• Don’t be the clever smarty pants who comes up with the ideas all by yourself—collaborate and co-create with your colleagues.

If you’d like to dive deeper into the world of bottleneck detection, check out The Bottleneck Rules: How to Get More Done (When Working Harder Isn’t Working) for more detective stories and advanced techniques.

Happy hunting, detective!