It’s complicated to shift our perception and the way we think if we live in a culture out of synch with what we are trying to achieve. That’s because we all live within networks of conversations that inevitably influence how we see the world. We are all ultimately free to choose our own path, but […]
Search Results for: what is a constraint
Why We Get Stuck on the Path to Change – The Human Constraint
“The only thing that does not require maintenance is obsolescence”, as Dr. W. Edwards Deming used to say. This is a fundamental truth: if we do not evolve, we regress. What makes everything more complicated is the pace at which we must evolve to survive. Technology speeds everything up, including the world of technology. Digital transformation involves transformation of business […]
How to Manage Time Constraints and Prioritize Tasks
If you’re looking for a way to prioritize your tasks and increase your productivity, and most of us are, you can take some powerful inputs from the Theory of Constraints. Every day, we all have to perform a number of tasks in different areas of our lives. Clearly, we can’t give equal attention to everything, […]
Using Your Constraints to Improve Business Performance
On a client’s website, they rightfully explain that their technology frees their customers of certain constraints. What exactly do we mean by constraints and are they a totally bad thing? We all want more freedom. A constraint would seem, by definition, to be something that robs us of freedom. But what we need to do […]
Why Do We Get Stuck on the Path to Change? The Human Constraint
Why is it so difficult to change, even when we know how to make it happen? Why is it so difficult to embrace newly learned and valid concepts and apply them? There are reasons why people resist change and there are also practical ways to work towards achieving an agreed upon goal. This was part […]
Exploit the Constraint, Not Your People (Are you listening, Amazon?)
An article in ‘Business Insider’ this month revisits what it’s like to work at Amazon. While there may have been some improvement since the 2015 NYT article that referred to a bruising culture and people crying at their desks, there still seems to be evidence of exploitation. There is only one kind of exploitation in organizations […]
Managing Risk through a Leverage Point (constraint) – A Systems View
In our last post Understanding Uncertainty and Systemic Risk in Organizations we explained how management must involve the management of variation. Every single process, relationship and communication in our organization, whether we are aware of it or not, is affected by variation. If we ignore variation then we are not managing, and if we are not […]
Tackling our Cognitive Constraints to Get to Breakthrough
A major stumbling block to growth for organizations lies in their cognitive constraints. In other words, there are mental models, or, more simply, limiting beliefs that prevent us from seeing solutions. In the Decalogue approach, we have worked over the last 20 years with hundreds of top and middle managers to build custom made implementations […]
Using Constraints as a Leverage Point for Sustainable Growth
Whether you’re aware of it or not, every organization has a constraint, something that currently limits output. Correctly identifying the constraint is the key to managing the entire organization in all its complexity with greater precision and predictability. As we have said many times, every human process, from getting to work in the morning to […]
The Theory of Constraints for IT and DevOps (or How to Train Your Phoenix)
Intelligent Management Inc. was invited by the IT department of a large insurance company to teach them about the Theory of Constraints for IT. They had read a book called ‘The Phoenix Project’ that points to the Theory of Constraints as a solution for radically improving software development and delivery. In this post we look […]