Find what’s holding your business back, then decide what to do about it. This is the complete system in one place: the worksheets, the checklist, and the exact prompts, so you can run it on your own business today.
The method borrows from Theory of Constraints and from Lean. What it actually takes: one process you can describe honestly, and whatever records the business already keeps about it.
Pick the process you’re worried about. Something with a clear start and end.
01
What you’re looking for
We call the thing that’s limiting a business its constraint. It might be a person, a decision, a system, a policy, or a recurring mistake. It’s rarely the loudest complaint. The goal isn’t to find something inefficient. It’s to find the one thing that, once it changes, lets the business do more than it can today.
1
Map the work. Reconstruct what happens, from evidence rather than memory.
2
Find the friction. Waiting, handoffs, rework, exceptions, bottlenecks, dependency.
3
Find the constraint. Test each candidate: if it changed, what could the business then do?
4
Find the cause. Ask why until it’s a rule, a capacity limit, or an ownership gap.
5
Choose the intervention. Hold the cause against each kind of fix, cheapest first, and take the first one that removes it.
6
Prove it. Write down what should change, then measure whether it did.
02
Find the friction
Waiting
Ready to move, but stuck on approval, reply, or availability.
Handoffs
Work changes hands between people or systems.
Rework
Something gets corrected, re-sent, or done twice.
Exceptions
The normal process breaks and everyone improvises.
Bottlenecks
Work piles up at one person, approval, or system.
Dependency
Only one person can do it, and everything waits on them.
03
Test which one is the constraint
For every candidate, finish this sentence, out loud or in writing:
“If we fixed this, the business would be able to ______.”
Specific — keep it
Handle more orders without hiring
Get proposals out in a day
Stop the owner reviewing every deliverable
Vague — keep digging
Be more efficient
Save some time
Have a cleaner process
04
List your candidates
Once section 02 has given you a shortlist, lay the candidates side by side before picking one.
Example
Problem: Proposals take 3.2 days to reach the customer
Evidence: CRM timestamps, 40 proposals
If fixed: Proposals out in under a day
Confidence: High — timestamps are unambiguous
Your candidates — copy this block for each one
Problem: ______
Evidence: ______
If fixed: ______
Confidence: ______
Test each candidate the way System 01 does before you decide which one to chase.
05
Ask why until you reach a cause
Ask why, repeatedly, until the answer is a rule, a decision, an ownership gap, or a real capacity limit — not just a task. Then test whatever AI gives you:
What evidence supports that?
What would we expect to see if this were true?
What else could explain the same pattern?
What’s missing that would help us be sure?
06
Choose the fix
In order of how cheap each is to try and to undo. Hold the cause against each one and stop at the first that removes it. Full reasoning in System 03.
1
Eliminate
2
Simplify
3
Change ownership
4
Change the rule
5
Improve the information
6
Use technology, including AI
Before committing to a fix, ask: does this remove the constraint, or does it just make the surrounding inefficiency faster? A faster report doesn’t fix a decision that isn’t getting made.
07
Decide how you’ll know it worked
Example — the proposal case from Systems 01–03
Today: standard proposals take 3.2 days on average to reach the customer. CRM timestamps, last 40 proposals.
Cause: every proposal waits for the owner’s review, because no rule says which pricing decisions need it. The wait is 2.6 of the 3.2 days; the writing is half a day.
Change: a one-page pricing framework for standard cases, written by the owner. Sales sends anything inside it directly. The owner sees only the exceptions.
Expected: standard proposals reach the customer within one business day; the owner reviews fewer than one in four.
Measure: CRM timestamp from proposal created to proposal sent, over the next 30 proposals. If the average is still above two days with the framework in use, the wait was somewhere else and the diagnosis was wrong.
Fill this in before you change anything
Today: what happens now, in numbers if you have them
Cause: what you believe is driving it, and why
Change: the smallest version of the fix you can test
Expected: what should happen if the diagnosis is right
Measure: how and when you’ll check
If the number doesn’t move, don’t assume the fix was built wrong first. Consider that the diagnosis was. Businesses are systems — when one constraint moves, another one is often what limits the system next. Find that one, and run it again.
What this gives you is a better way to look at your business, with AI doing the reading and the reconstruction that used to take weeks of someone’s time by hand.
