There’s loads of value in going back and revisiting the classics, not just to remind ourselves why they are a classic, but also to see which of those lessons we are missing out on and could be making more use of in our day-to-day lives.
The Goal is one of those classics that anyone in a large organisation should take the time to read. It’s a story based around a struggling factory, a company under stress and a leader who can’t find the way forwards. It’s also a lot more than that. It’s a primer in system thinking, the theory of constraints and some of the basics of queuing theory.
Before you go too far, it is also worth highlighting that it’s a bit of a product of its time, some of the scenario is very “mid century American corporate”, whilst the trappings may feel dated, the core principles are solid.
It strips everything back to the core question. What is the end goal of a company? To make money by providing maximum value. What other measures matter? None.
You go through a journey of learning, identifying where the bottlenecks are, removing them in turn and finding more capacity than you ever thought you had, with no fresh investment.
Forcing things through, chasing with “urgency” might just fight your immediate fire, but it won’t transform your delivery, or get you out of a hole. Only taking the time to step back, to look at everything going on, find the thing that is constrained and fixing it. Only having that discipline will make a difference.
We learn that making assumptions is misleading. We need to get out on the shop floor to really see what’s going on. We all learn that small fluctuations lead to large delays in the end, especially as the number of steps increases.
Wherever you can remove a dependency, you speed everything up. Each time you remove wasted effort from your bottleneck, you speed everything up. Where you find a way to put more resources to serve your constraint, you speed everything up.
When you look at the system overall, you see the cost/benefit equation differently. The costs of an hour in the bottleneck is a cost of an hour of overall production.
Improving things that aren’t the bottleneck is just waste. Piling up more half finished things in a queue for a constrained machine is a cost, not creating more value.
Improving the bottleneck is worth doing even inefficiently. You don’t consider the cost of the step, you must measure against the cost of value forgone overall.
This way of thinking isn’t easy to come by, it’s a lot easier to manage a dependency, to optimise on the micro and to celebrate getting your bit done. Switching to this model of systems thinking requires discipline, and it requires lots of belief. These findings are counter-intuitive, and contrary to the easy answer or standard thinking.
You need to convert the production line concepts to your own context, which you can do in any creative endeavour.
Give people this book, get them to read it and then you can start your experiments in optimising the system and delivering the most possible value!
James Osborn 