What the Heck Is Constraints Management?

“The aim of leadership should be to improve the performance of man and machine, to improve quality, to increase output, and simultaneously to bring pride of workmanship to people. Put in a negative way, the aim of leadership is not merely to find and record failures of men, but to remove the causes of failure: to help people to do a better job with less effort.”
? W. Edwards Deming

Constraints come in all shapes and sizes. Some have easy solutions. Some have workarounds. Some are unsolvable but may provide insights of value.

I got to the office of a startup company that had their first round of funding. The CEO had decided that he needed outside help to solve a problem. I was met by a young woman who rushed me off to a conference room. She said. “I’m so sorry you had to come all this way. We thought we needed an expert but our CEO, who’s completely committed to solving the problem, decided that we’ll fix it ourselves. He assigned it to a team and has given us until the end of June to provide a solution.” It was February. Curious, I asked what the problem was. I love solving problems and have never met a constraint that didn’t excite me. It must have been a huge constraint to require a team and four months for a solution. “We have a product ready to sell. We hired five top salespeople from major corporations last September, and they can’t agree on the sales form.” I sat there in disbelief.

The constraint was not as simple as it sounds.

Startup operations are not well defined. Staff from large corporations are comfortable with a well-defined system. It’s rarely a good match.

• There was not a clear mission and vision, understood by all the stakeholders.
• An uncertain CEO who may have been the technical lead on the product, wasn’t clear on his role.
• Advisors or investors were not hands on.
• Five salespeople were definitely not clear on their roles and thought that arguing was a good use of their employer’s funding.

Solutions were easy. Two came to mind immediately. The committed CEO could lay the five forms out on a table and pick the one he liked best. He could add any elements he liked from the other forms. Then,

1. He could remind his sales staff that he hired them to sell and get them out of the building.
2. Or, he could put the form he preferred on his website and replace five salespeople with one good marketing person with startup experience.

Leadership is not always a skill that technical experts have developed. Whether you just invented the greatest widget ever or have the best construction business the world has ever seen, removing the causes of failure and helping people to do a better job with less effort is a good place to start.