The question that opens things up
The most exciting question to answer is: Where should we start?
Choose well, and you can open the floodgates on a project—or in an organization. But the right place to start may be outside your comfort zone, your department, or your usual wheelhouse.
That can be uncomfortable. It may mean admitting that the way things work now is hurting the organization—and something has to change.
Choosing wrong can feel exciting, too. Sometimes it feels even more exciting. The wrong ideas can be the most seductive: easy to picture, fun to build, and simple for lots of people to get behind.
Like when you were a kid and snapped a glowstick. You felt that little inner vial crack, and within moments the whole thing was glowing. It was hard not to get excited.
That’s what a new idea can feel like: one quick snap, and suddenly there’s light and possibility everywhere. But the glowstick doesn’t power the room. Its light is bright for a while, then it fades.
Newness can get an idea moving. It can even help one person push past the first objections by supplying extra effort and organizational will. But that energy can’t make a bad starting point the right one.
Find Herbie
That brings me to Herbie—a story Dave Waring shared on LinkedIn, from The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt.
In the story, one slow hiker holds back the whole group. When the bottleneck stays hidden, everyone moves at its pace without being sure why. People feel the slowdown, but may not agree on what’s causing it.
Once Herbie is brought to the front, the constraint is visible. The group can adjust around it and work on the problem together. Improving that one point helps everyone move faster.
A glowstick gives you a burst of light—and a burst of excitement. A floodlight helps you see the whole path, including where it narrows.
Make the constraint visible, put it where everyone can see it, and give it the attention it needs.
Imagine a support team swamped by routine requests. An agent could answer common questions and route unusual cases to a person—so smart people spend less time playing whack-a-mole and more time on problems that need their judgment.
That’s automation focused on the constraint: not adding a shiny tool for its own sake, but helping the whole system move.
In an era of automation, the thrilling question is still where to start—and whether we’re willing to focus the light on the real constraint.
That’s where the light can do more than glow. It can help us see what’s been slowing everything down.
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