This is probably the most important question today's leaders should be asking themselves. Not: how fast can we deploy AI? Or: how do we avoid falling behind? But this one, the uncomfortable one.
It never stops to amaze me how little time leaders spend on what is actually the most important part of their job — driving collective results. Individual productivity is easy to measure and easy to celebrate. System throughput is harder. Especially now, when every boardroom conversation has somehow become a race to show AI adoption numbers.
But reality is cruel. And rather simple:
"An hour saved at a non-bottleneck is a mirage."
— Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt, The Goal
One book. If you can only read one management book in your life, make it this one. It will completely change how you see every process, every meeting, every tool rollout. Trust me.
So here is the uncomfortable truth most AI deployments don't want you to see: AI makes you faster at everything — including running into your own bottleneck. Or running in the wrong direction.
Your team produces more, ok. Drafts faster, responds faster, analyses faster. But if the constraint sits somewhere else in the system — legal review, a single decision-maker (CxO, SLT name it), a slow integration, a manual approval step — all you have done is build a longer queue at the same chokepoint. You haven't accelerated the system. You've accelerated the line into it.
That is how AI makes you slower. Not by failing. By succeeding in the wrong place.
And that's just the beginning. Because beyond bottlenecks, there is a whole taxonomy of waste that AI can either eliminate — or quietly amplify. Most companies are doing both, without realising it.
Two old frameworks. One important question: Is your AI adoption making the system better, or just busier?
This is the first post in a series exploring AI through the lens of Lean waste management and Theory of Constraints. Each post takes one type of waste, examines what AI can do to it, and gives you a practical lens for your next deployment decision.