Bottlenecks

I spent a great deal of time learning, implementing, and thinking about bottlenecks as I went through my Lean Six Sigma immersion in 2013. In any system with some form of complexity, there are variabilities and inherent differences in performance. In simpler terms, different parts of any system will always have these little differences between them.

As result over time, a bottleneck forms — a particular area where things are slow, frustrating, and incredibly inefficient. It’s very easy to tell as human beings. We hate to wait in line; we dislike traffic; we abhor poor restaurant customer service. It’s like we have a strange allergic reaction to bottlenecks.

I did some thinking and since Lean Six Sigma, if you don’t know, is all about continuous incremental improvements, I thought: why not think of ways to apply this knowledge to my own life? Why not look for debilitating bottlenecks in my own life that’s making it harder for me to live how I want?

As previously mentioned, in a fairly inefficient system, bottlenecks give us a strange allergic-like reaction. I’ve come to realize that this reaction manifests all too common to us: lack of self-confidence, anxiety and fear.

Think about it: if you’re fairly efficient and well-performing in sports, you have that swagger and that confidence to make that shot. In fitness, you’re confident you can bench press that weight to impress. In fashion, you can carry yourself well and pepper your social media with #ootd tags. It feels free-flowing.

The reverse is true: in sports, you wouldn’t want to take that shot and rather defer the decisive plays to others. In fitness, the gym feels like a torture house because you’re afraid to show your flabby waist or because you can only lift light weights. In fashion, you wouldn’t want to run into anyone you know and show them how drab and mundane you look. It feels limiting.

We ought to actively look for kinks in our armour, our bottlenecks, and remove them. It’s not a one-and-done either. When you fix a bottleneck in one area, it shows up in another — you do this forever and improve yourself endlessly.

We can make this search simpler, easier, and more palatable. For today’s improvement:

I will perform simple daily actions focused on a particular area that I am least confident in— like Google searching for an article or tutorial — until I feel more confident

Just doing simple things like reading a simple article helps a lot. We sometimes treat these trivial things like monsters simply because we don’t know enough. What’s so scary about doing 2 more push-ups? Or, doing a simple challenge to wear something with a bit more colour in it?

For myself, I’ve been doing this for a few days now about my perceived limited skills in design. I did a simple Google search on how to design better UI and it led me to this article by Erik Kennedy. It led me to a plethora of things that I didn’t know about — and didn’t know I can proficiently do — none of which I would’ve stumbled upon if I didn’t do that search.

Google your problems away — someone might be writing about the same issues with solutions that may work for you.