#65 - Where are your bottlenecks?
11 Jun 25
Organisations are evolving all the time as structures change and personnel change roles. But when this change occurs, how many bottlenecks are inadvertently being created?
How do you recognise them and what should be done to eliminate them?
Inadvertently created bottlenecks may be causing your business money in terms of lack of resilience and flexibility of response within the modern, agile and dynamic business environment.
It pays to flush them out, and build capacity into the organisation!
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#65 - Where are your bottlenecks?
What?
Bottlenecks are single points in your business where work consistently slows down or gets stuck.
This could be a person who holds all the decision-making power, a process that’s overly complex, or a system that can’t handle demand. It often shows up as:
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Waiting on one person for approvals. This can be particularly frustrating if the bottleneck is caused not by the organisation, but by the leadership style of the person themselves,
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Overloaded departments,
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Knowledge or skills that only one person has. Also known as a single point of failure,
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Work piling up at a certain stage of a project.
The frustration that such an arrangement causes can be hugely magnified and result in a big impact on the agility of a business to respond in a dynamic environment.
Why?
Bottlenecks make your organisation fragile, unsustainable and difficult to scale.
Here’s what they cost you:
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Fragility: If one point fails, the whole system slows or stops.
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Burnout: Key people get overwhelmed, which can lead to mistakes or exits.
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Lack of agility: Teams are forced to wait instead of acting.
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No scalability: Growth becomes impossible if everything runs through a few chokepoints.
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Lost initiative: Teams grow passive when they can’t move work forward on their own.
Bottlenecks don’t just slow things down. They erode resilience, team morale and ultimately the long-term performance of the Company.
How?
There are a number of ways that an organisation can start to rectify this situation. Designing a system that distributes responsibility, knowledge and authority is the best place to start.
Here are three ways that can help you in this regard:
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Map the Flow:
Visualise how work moves through your team or organisation. Where does it consistently slow down? That’s your first bottleneck. -
Distribute Ownership:
Make sure decisions, approvals, and knowledge don’t sit with just one person. Cross-train, delegate and document. -
Build Slack Into the System:
Resilient systems have built-in capacity. That doesn’t mean hiring more people, it means smarter load-balancing, clearer roles and simplifying wherever possible.
If your progress relies on a single person or step, you’re one sick day away from a complete standstill. This could represent an unacceptable risk for your business.
Bottlenecks don’t fix themselves. Resilient organisations find them and design around them.
In Summary
I hope that you enjoyed reading this newsletter and that it has given you food for thought.
The aim of any business is to ensure that business operations continue whatever challenges may be experienced. Whilst that normally refers to externally generated threats, internal threats can have just as much, if not more impact.
Resilience and robustness are the key to ensure that your organisation isn't inadvertently creating unsustainable chokepoints.
Have a great week!
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