I run my life on the Theory of Constraints. Find the bottleneck. Fix it. Find the next one.
It works. I have solved bottleneck after bottleneck. Publishing cadence, sleep, demand generation, experiments. Each one unlocked the next level.
But something else has been building while I was focused on throughput.
Risk.
I keep leaving things behind. My phone at a restaurant last week. My bag at a park this morning. No catastrophe yet. I’m still producing. Still shipping. My throughput has not dropped.
Nowhere does ToC say: watch for risk that is accumulating outside the constraint.
You can have high throughput, solved bottlenecks, met necessary conditions and growing exposure to catastrophic loss. The scoreboard looks good. Underneath, risk is accumulating.
Think of 2008. The banks kept maximizing throughput. Incentives rewarded it. It had no category. It was invisible until it was everything.
I do not have an answer yet. But I think the question matters.
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What risk is accumulating in your life while you focus on throughput?
