If you watch a busy ant trail, you notice that the flow is only as fast as its narrowest point. If traffic jams at a junction, everyone behind it waits – no matter how diligent they are.
Companies work the same way. An approval step, an overloaded person or an unclear handover point slows down the entire process. More speed before or after it does not help.
How to find the bottleneck
- Draw one central process on a single page – from trigger to result.
- Mark every step where work waits.
- Ask those involved: “Where do you wait most often – and for what?”
- Roughly measure the waiting time per step. The biggest block is your bottleneck.
What helps then
Relieve the narrowest point first: distribute tasks, clarify decision rights or remove steps that add no value. Only then is it worth speeding up other parts.
Your next step
Pick a process the team regularly complains about and draw it. In the Canvas, this topic belongs to the field “Processes & structures”.
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