A Little Bottleneck Story (That Might Just Help You!)

This is so cool ... a 2 minute read.

I need to tell you about Norman.

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.

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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.