In every system, you have potential and constraints.
The “theory of constraints” basic philosophy can be boiled down to:
Every system will grow up to its constraints and no further.
Most entrepreneurs and executives spend all their time trying to add potential to their businesses. In doing so, they think they are solving their business constraints, but they are not.
Most of the time, they develop new lanes of potential or just don’t realize they’re capped by one of their constraints.
The hunger for shipping new stuff and the frenetic energy that comes with it is not what makes macro speed happen. It’s knowing which problems to solve and, most importantly, in what order.
To visualize this, you can think of your business as a chain with many links.
Each link is a piece of your business big enough to make sense on its own, such as a department, section, a specific process, or a part of your delivery chain.
When connected, these links form a chain.
This chain is your business.
The point is, when you stretch that chain of yours, the weakest link will break first.
Your biggest constraint is the weakest link in your chain that allows it to break.
That link is the one thing not strong enough to support the weight of more potential.
As a strategist, your goal is to identify the weakest links in your chain and reinforce them in the order most relevant to your specific context.
Since an infinite game is a resource game (see “The nature of business” chapter), the best order is — most of the time — the one that allows you to reinforce the highest number of weak links with the least resources possible.
So, like every other business on earth, your business has constraints, and you have to identify them right now.
For this, you will need to ask yourself the right questions.
To help you do it right, I made a free business constraints identifier available in the free tools section of Hyperstonk.
If you’re of the curious kind, you can learn more about the theory of constraints here on Amazon.