The Law of Limiting Constraints

Every new strategy should be tested against the law of limiting constraints. Limiting constraints are the things that will prevent your idea or strategy from being as successful as you desire it to be. They are issues that become constraints to what you wish would happen but the constraint becomes a barrier. If, however, you can identify those probable constraints ahead of time and make necessary modifications to mitigate them, your strategy is likely to be more successful than it would have been.

I once led an international mission agency that was seeing too many unqualified personnel being sent to the field in spite of having a well honed system for vetting prospective missionaries. As we looked at the systems we discovered two limiting constraints that were preventing us from achieving better outcomes.

The first of these constraints was philosophical and the second was in the testing and interviewing we did. It is well known that mission agencies have a history of overlooking issues that candidates have since one of their main indicators of success is their total number of missionaries. Unless this metric could be changed from the numbers of missionaries to the emotional, spiritual, EQ, relational and skill health of prospective staff we would continue to get the results that were less than satisfactory. This required us to change our definitions of success for the recruiting department. The wrong metric was a limiting constraint.

The other limiting constraint was that we used ineffective testing materials and had the wrong people interviewing prospective staff. Bad information in, bad information out. We ended up shutting down our intake process for six months so we could build it from the ground up. Had we not dealt with these two limiting constraints we would not have solved our problems.

In both designing new strategies and evaluating current ones, take the time to ask what the potential or current constraints are that keep you from being more successful than you are. Then do the hard work of figuring out how you can remove those constraints from your system. Constraints are barriers to success. The more you can identify and remove those barriers the better off you will be.

Why the need to know everything becomes a barrier to growth

Many leaders believe that they need to know everything that is happening in their organization or on their team. It is usually a mistake! Why? Because it normally means that the leader is not empowering others to lead. In addition as a ministry grows there is no way that leaders will know everything that is happening.

While knowing everything works in a small ministry it becomes a bottleneck in a large ministry. In addition, those who need to know everything also need to control everything which means that they have not empowered others and that the more they know the more they meddle. 

I know pastors who operate this way in churchs of 1,000+ and it is deeply demotivating to staff who are unempowered every time they need permission to move forward or when their work is reworked by the senior leader. His goal may be to protect the ministry but it is the wrong way to accomplish that. You protect the ministry by having great clarity and the right leaders. 

My own rule is that I need to know what it is necessary for me to know, not all that I could know. I expect leaders in the organization (in my case at senior leadership levels) to tell me what I need to know. This includes major initiatives, where we are seeing significant results, significant challenges they are encountering and when things go wrong, a heads up.

What I really need to know is that I have the right leaders in place and that they have great clarity as to what the organization is about. If that is true, I can trust those leaders to lead well, deal with situations wisely and drive the missional agenda in a disciplined way. Knowing I have the right people is far more important than knowing everything that is happening. If I need to know the latter it is because I don't have the right people. If I know the former I don't need to know the latter.