Structural Bottlenecking
Routing every decision through one person or point — deliberately, to keep control, or accidentally, by habit — sets the speed of the whole system to that point's and makes it the lever anyone who captures it can pull.
An everyday example
A CEO who must approve every contract, and a vendor who has learned to time asks for the CEO's busiest week.
What it can cost you
Throughput and quality capped by one node; dependence on and manipulation through a single gatekeeper.
Warning signs
- Speed is set by one calendar.
- Whoever influences that one person controls the outcome.
One thing to do
Find the constraint, decide whether it is deliberate, and either resource it or distribute the decisions with clear thresholds.
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