A quick note of an article from Brad Cairns of the Center for Lean Learning, Where Lean Meets Theory of Constraints. In it he gives an overview of both Lean and TOC and how they can work together - something that isn’t always obvious to people deep in one approach or the other.
I love how he homes in on the idea of Focus, and the classic pair of Eli Goldratt quotes from The Goal,
“An hour saved at a non-bottleneck is a mirage”
“An hour lost at the bottleneck is lost forever”
This is a great reminder. There are always plenty of things to do and places that need “fixing” - usually way more ideas than there is capacity to track them down. We don’t want to multitask for ourselves or our teams. Find that One Thing where we can focus and have the biggest impact. This shouldn’t take endless hours of analysis either - use your intuition and then focus. If it is truly the wrong place to focus, the results will tell you - did the system get better?