How to Find a Bottleneck

Last week I was doing some work with a wonderful manufacturing business. This is an established SME with a great team, decent profits and a good customer base.

But, when I listened carefully to the words the team used, one kept repeating. That word was "chaos". It was used casually 3 times by 3 different people within 15 minutes of me arriving.

Part of the coach's toolkit is to spot repeating words. They often indicate something the people know but can't see.

In this case, the source of the chaos wasn't clear. When I looked around, the factory seemed much more orderly than others I have seen recently. But, clearly something was wrong.

So here's what we did.

I asked the team to explain to me where a new order would enter the factory. Who would receive it?

Then I asked everyone else to stand in a line to visually demonstrate how that order would be passed from person to person (team to team).

Next we said, let's think of an order that goes well. What information would you have?

And everyone described, pretty smoothly, how the order would flow through the factory. Because they had the information they needed.

Then we said, let's think of an order that goes badly, what information would be missing?

This time as the order passed along the line, the chaos was obvious. The order bounced around between person 1 and person 2. Then it went to person 3 who didn't know what to do with it.

But it was at person 4 that the chaos really started. The errors that were already introduced compounded with other errors and the whole system broke down.

Now that everyone could see this, some of the system fixes became clear. That didn't mean they were easy to implement, but it was crystal clear what they needed to work on. Which they agreed to do.

More importantly, in the short term, everyone got to see the impact of little errors or workarounds that they were using. They understood how certain little details were crucial to removing the chaos from the system. And they had better understanding of the work they all do.

So, if you have a feeling you have flow problems, maybe try to walk it through like this to find the real bottlenecks. They are probably not where you think they are.

Or, hire an experienced coach to do something like this for you. He'll probably see things you could never see.

Have a great day, Stephen

If you need help with team coaching, I am able to take on a couple more team corporate clients soon. I'm fully booked until mid April, so if you need help in-person or online, get in touch for a planning call.