Bottleneck · Limiting Factor

Two names for what is actually setting the pace: the bottleneck is the resource whose capacity limits the whole; the limiting factor is the scarcest necessary input of any kind.

Bottleneck. The resource whose capacity limits the throughput of the whole system. There is always one, and improving anything else changes nothing. The received handling is a cycle: identify it; exploit it, so that every unit of its capacity counts; subordinate everything else to it, pacing the rest to its rate; elevate it, raising its capacity — and then identify again, because once elevated, the bottleneck moves somewhere else (Theory Of Constraints · Throughput · Flow · Critical Path).

Limiting factor. The scarcest necessary input at a given moment, which sets the rate of the whole — as the scarcest nutrient sets a plant's growth however much of everything else is present. This is wider than a resource: it can be trust, attention, a decision nobody has made, a word not yet given, water. A bottleneck is a limiting factor that happens to be a resource (Trust · Attunement · The Decision · Communication Debt).

The second name is the one that earns its keep in a body like this. Most Cells are not limited by anything countable. They are limited by the fact that nobody has decided, or that two people are not speaking, or that the person who knows has not been asked — and a body that only looks for bottlenecks will look at its capacity and find nothing wrong (Mend a Tension · Request For Guidance · Having Difficult Conversations).

The Path's other terms are kept distinct from these, deliberately. A Constraint in this canon is anything keeping a single activity from being ready to be committed to — a missing decision, material, hand or predecessor — found in the look-ahead and cleared by an owner by a date (Make-Ready Process · The look-ahead). In the wider constraint literature the constraint means what is called the bottleneck here; the canon keeps the word for the make-ready sense and says so. And drum, buffer, rope names how a system paces itself to its bottleneck: the bottleneck sets the beat, a buffer keeps it fed, work upstream is released at its pace, so nothing floods and nothing idles (Float · Pull planning · Last Planner System).

Also called: the bottleneck · the limiting factor Stands on: Theory Of Constraints · Throughput · Constraint Opens onto: Critical Path · Float · Pull planning · Make-Ready Process · Last Planner System · Flow · Prioritizing · The look-ahead · Waste In play: the weekly look-ahead and the season's plan — the question of what is actually setting the pace, asked before any effort is added anywhere Sources: The Terms of the Path — Critical Path, Critical Chain, Bottleneck, Limiting Factor (root page; its own frontmatter declares it a proposal awaiting resonance — the definitions above are its) · Theory Of Constraints, Throughput (root pages) · lionsberg.wiki: The Terms of the Path Open: The source page is a self-declared proposal, not an agreed page, and it says so; these senses are the best current articulation and are not settled. · The proposal also notes the collision it inherits — constraint means one thing in the wider literature and another here — and that collision is live in the corpus. · Inbound links were not counted for this concept.