WHERE IS YOUR BOTTLENECK IN LIFE?
WHAT IS PREVENTING MORE GREAT STUFF IN LIFE?
WE ARE IN THE "BUSINESS" OF LIFE
In the physical world, which is the only world where we live, the only “real” world, we are in the business of life where we own our own manufacturing plant, where we produce things of value to our lives. And this plant operates exactly the same as a consumer products manufacturing company with the same realities.
We know that a manufacturing plant has supplies and materials coming in one end, being worked on and put together into a product and at the end of the production line a finished product will come out.
What if there was a bottleneck in the process at the beginning where the buyer just did not buy enough materials to feed the production line? Production out the other end would be significantly less.
What if that were not the case, but the workers were untrained, unskilled, with low knowledge? Wouldn’t that cause them to be less productive so that they produced less product out the other end?
What if the workers were Ethel and Luci, hiding all the chocolates so that the manager was assuming the flow of the production line was the maximum right flow? They are trying, as we do analogously in life in general, to not "be fired" (mostly in our imaginations).
What if there were not enough trucks to pick up the goods produced?
Any point in the production line that limits the production that is doable after that point is called a bottleneck.
IS THIS TRUE ABOUT LIFE, REALLY?
What if that were true about one’s production of life?
Well, of course, it is.
If a person has a poor education, he is doomed to lower productivity, less money, less of lots of things, and less potential life. (And that is not discriminatory, as it is true of all of us. The flaw in the process of education is the lack of opportunity and/or the training from the culture one is born into.)
What if a person learns as a child to be extremely anxious and then lives his life later that way, isn’t he going to have to take care of that anxiety and use a lot of his resources to process it and thus be able to have less throughput through his brain (i.e. thinking capacity at a higher level) and thus be less productive of good in his life?
What if he learned and learned and learned lots of stuff to do in life but could not use that increased resource of knowledge because he was so caught up in anxiety (or “emotional conflict”, such as confusion, overwhelm, stress, etc.) that he could not apply it productively?
What if he were to try to learn how to manage and correct his emotions so that he could get rid of the bottlenecks caused by anxiety, but he kept on not being able to hear and understand sufficiently to actually implement it? Wouldn’t that be a “self disabling vicious circle to nowhere”? In other words, he can’t learn to be less anxious in order to enable hims to get around to actually learning to get less anxious because he is too anxious. (Well, you get the idea...)
What if we knew that there were steps in each process that had to be corrected or we could never get to where we want to be?
The process would continue to be broken until we actually found a point (a step) to intervene in order to cause a different result.
In the case above, the obvious solution if one could sit down and think it through, would be to figure out how to overcome some of the so-far unidentified blocks that lead to the block we've named above, which blocks are the inability to manage oneself, lack of self control, lack of ability to concentrate and focus attention, etc. And, of course, there are several "production lines" that produce those dysfunctions - they are dysfunctional ways of thinking, generally incorrect beliefs that are still kept despite the fact that they don't work!
Well, that is alot to try to get around and it might appear to be hopeless, especially if he keeps on doing the same old thing over and over that doesn’t work over and over but “will be different this time”? (He "reups" his commitment to follow through with the necessary learning, which is what he always does, but then finds he doesn't have the self control or self management ability to follow through...)
Maybe we could find a resource that would in a brief period of time, in the form of a workshop, isolate him and manage him and direct him and guide him through the process of learning about beliefs and fears and emotions, get him to actually doing his homework with no delay, because it had to be ready for the next supervised step. And it would do it fast, get him up to a higher level of emotional competence (often misnamed “emotional intelligence”, whereas it is more like “emotional smartness” or “emotional awareness, plus some tools”). It would replace years and years of slow or no progress. (Consider The Hoffman Institute as the resource.)
Wouldn’t that be potentially the only possible solution? (Let me know if you think of another one, please. Contact.)
"BALANCING THE PRODUCTION LINE" = MORE WITH THE SAME RESOURCES!
In business school, we were taught “linear programming”, which is a method using algebraic solutions to maximize the production in a plant given its current capacity. In life, we must do the same thing (without the algebra).
Right now there is a huge capacity we all have. It is one that we never meet the edges of, so it is virtually unlimited in a sense. Or at least it is the biggest opportunity for greater “throughput” in life.
It is the capacity of the linear, serial processing unit called the prefrontal cortex. It is the productive thinking ability of the higher brain.
However, if we use that processing capability on low level items being produced when we could use it for high level, high value items, we are wasting our capacity. When we keep shoving alot of worthless or low value crap through it, we leave little processing capability for processing the high value stuff. If we leave a volume of problems that are unsolved and have to be recycled over and over through the higher brain, keeping it occupied and unavailable for production of higher value itemks, we are surely blowing it. And the “it” is life value itself, as if it poured down the drain for no, or little, benefit at all.
We can “re-balance” the line in this case by early on in the production line solving the problems so that they do not keep getting in the way of greater production (of happiness and related products). This will have an effect of tripling, at least, the capacity for throughput, but more likely there would be a geometric effect due to the higher brain’s ability to generate thinking that generates a better process that creates geometrically greater value.
What if a person simply does not have the knowledge to do better but has a brain capable of fully functioning (which most of us do) with lots of extra, unused capacity? Then the bottleneck to fix is to expand knowledge, which could then be used by the higher brain to produce more of value!
What if a person never finished things, wouldn’t he have blown the time he could have used to actually produce a valuable result? What if the unfinished things also cluttered his mind, causing more anxiety and confusion and a lowered mood, what would happen to his available brain functioning? Each part of the process affects the others.
IT'S LIKE A LINE OF WORK STATIONS
Perhaps at this point you “get” an idea of how this works.
If we have a number of work stations all in a row, passing on the product from one to the other to be worked on and one of the work stations has a very slow worker, the throughput on the other end will be at the pace of the slow(est) worker. Wouldn’t you then seek to solve that problem asap, since it is the critical bottleneck that causes the line to be out of balance?
(All things occur in a similar way to “lines of work stations” as all things occur in a series of “dependent events”, where one event is affected by the previous event in the chain. Sometime we call those “steps” and we call the series “sequences”. Sometimes we call them “systems” as each thing occurs in a system to work to produce a result out the other end.
Some systems are physical, as the electricity and lights in our house, but many systems, while technically actually physical, appear to be “intangible”, such as “belief systems”. “our body energy systems”, and super complex systems such as the body or brain, etc.)
Well, in life, it is the same or analogous.
There are some nuances or other factors. Perhaps one of the workers talks so much that he slows the others down. Wouldn’t that be similar to the emotional processing station occupying the rest of the brain with lots of noise and problems to think about - a process called anxiety?
SO, WE MIGHT ASK, WHAT ARE THE POTENTIAL BOTTLENECKS IN LIFE?
Look at these and figure out which ones have to be widened (increased), so that you can balance your line and eventually increase your capacity even beyond that: (check off which of these areas to you need to relieve the bottleneck in. Then identify the key limiting bottleneck, the one that most restricts throughput, and then sequence the other ones in order of impact - work on them in that order! To work on an area, enter its name into the search engine.)
__ The psychological/emotional barriers
__ Anxiety, other forms of emotional upset
__ Requiring constant handling and distractions, inability to focus
__ Lack of confidence syndrome
__ Dependency
__ “Not good enough”
__ Lack of life competency, actual
__ Lack of ability to see reality
__ Lack of knowledge
__ Fear - Direct effects but also causing side effects, such as cutting out options that
__ Confusion (a form of fear)
__ Lack of supporting systems, habits, automatic, effortless, etc.
__ Behavioral
__ Wrong concepts of what works
__ Emotional barriers affecting behavior (to escape, to hide, to not be “free”)
__ Not completing things
__ Inability to concentrate (a number of dimensions to this)
__ Motivational
__ Conflicting needs (especially as with anxiety, where amygdala “needs” to handle
things)
__ Lack of learning, knowledge, or correction
__ Incomplete learning, not finishing to “sufficient”
__ Not learning in critical (throughput) areas in life
__ GIGO - Garbage in, garbage out even if highly intelligent! (Needs correction,
more correct input!)
__ Productivity
__ Lack of knowledge of how to be productive
__ Poor behavior, poor management
__ Lack of supporting systems
__ Time management system
__ Assigning hard stuff to proper level of thinking ability in cycle (the three "selves")
__ Middle ability
__ Low, slowing (easygoing, flaky, low thinking ability, fun...)
__ Failure to implement (look for an earlier cause that is the bottleneck before this)
__ Energy system
__ Large decline periods, efficiency way down
__ Lack of a process for thinking
__ Lack of a problem solving and decision making process (including handling
emotions that get in the way)
In the case of Daniel, a highly intelligent individual, he is unable to implement and complete on things, misunderstands or fails to understand, is handicapped and bottlenecked by anxiety and fears. He could not implement the learning program because of the earlier bottleneck of anxiety and fears, so efforts to teach did not succeed very well. The only intervention program that would work had to be the one week intensive, mentioned above.
WHAT TO DO NOW
1. Identify the bottlenecks. (Check off which apply.)
2. Prioritize them into a list from top importance downward.
3. Work on them in that order until each is corrected sufficiently to free up enough flow.
- Finish working on them later, after the correction of the biggest dysfunctional part.
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Of possible interest to some, good analogies that apply:
A MANUFACTURING NOVEL
One of the highest selling business books of all time is a novel about manufacturing, with a drama about using wisdom to solve production problems.
But if you substitute terms that are used for humans and for life, the book is a great story of how to improve life, how to increase the life value produced by our own human manufacturing plant.
(Although not a novel, my book is also analogically about "productivity", but in terms not of widgets or money but life value. It is a virtually costless Kindle book, downloadable on any computer: Life Value Productivity.)
Chapter Eighteen
In this chapter Jonah introduces Alex to the concept of bottlenecks and non-bottlenecks. Jonah defines these terms as follows. "A bottleneck is any resource whose capacity is equal to or less than the demand placed upon it." A non-bottleneck is any resource whose capacity is greater than the demand placed on it."
Jonah explains that Alex should not try to balance capacity with demand, but instead balance the flow of product through the plant. Later, Alex and his team recognize the bottlenecks, the areas where capacity doesn’t equal demand, like the slow kid Herbie on the hike. [If things must happen all in a line, they are like slow Herbie being in the front of the boy scouts on the hike, instead of being in the back. With this discovery goes the ideas related to reorganizing the plant like Alex did with the hike.] Production is a process and the steps cannot be bypassed very easily. Many processes rely on the previous one to be able to complete the next. Alex would need more machines, which takes more capital, and the division is not going to go for that.
[The "slow kid" in the personal analogy for Daniel is his anxiety and its effect on his effectiveness. The process of learning will go much slower because of that or it will simply not be doable at all. In effect, he must go back to a slower reading group in elementary school, so that it is suitable for him. But the better alternative is to take the child Daniel and to do an intensive "reading program" to catch up to function well enough to be in a higher group. (I, in the 4th grade had my teacher give me special reading training, from an Uncle Scrooge comic book. Thereafter, I got straight A's.) The program in this case, of course, is actual an intensive emotional learning program, with systems and training on how to manage them - without that it would be a slow process over many years - and it would be a crime not to do the "rapid learning" process.]
Chapter Fifteen
Fully understanding the "dependent events", Alex puts the slowest kid in the front of the hike and he relieves him of extra weight he has been carrying in his backpack [thus speeding the slowest member up and thus the whole line!] This balances the fluctuations and increases the kid’s productivity, which increased the throughput of the team. [See, re "dependent events", on The Site: Cause And Effect - Where There Is An Effect, There Must Be A Cause (a causal chain).]
