Essential Dynamics with Derek Hudson

TOC Founder Eli Goldratt concluded the ultimate constraint of any organization is how much attention management has to apply to the business. Derek and Reed go deeper on this subject and end up discussing ways to help their own tendencies to distraction.

Show Notes

Derek is at derekhudson.ca. 
See full show notes at the Essential Dynamics Wiki.

What is Essential Dynamics with Derek Hudson?

Join Derek Hudson as he explores Essential Dynamics, a framework for approaching the challenges facing people and organizations. Consider your Quest!

Reed:

It's Essential Dynamics. I'm Reed McColm, your host, and I'm really good looking today. I wish you could see me. But I'm here with somebody who is usually good looking most of the time and that is mister Derek Hudson. Derek, are you there?

Derek:

Hey. I'm doing great, Reed. I'm having a good hair day today.

Reed:

Oh, see. I wish I could say that. I am so glad to be meeting with you today. What are we going to be talking about through the prism of Essential Dynamics today?

Derek:

So I really want to talk about the ultimate constraint of any organization.

Reed:

Wow. And what is it?

Derek:

What is that? Well, let me back up a little bit. So the theory of constraints is an important concept that I consider in essential dynamics. Theory of constraints is pretty easy to explain which is in any complex system that's that's being used to produce some kind of output, there's one thing in that system that has the lowest capacity to produce the output and that's the constraint. And if you improve anything else in the system and you don't improve that constraint, you don't get any more out the other end.

Reed:

Ah.

Derek:

And so let's just think of an example. Oh, I don't know. Maybe the Suez Canal.

Reed:

Now that comes to mind. Yes.

Derek:

Yeah. So

Reed:

I have thought more about the Suez Canal recently than I have in my entire life, but please go ahead.

Derek:

Right. So, if you're trying to fix the global shipping system right now well, I guess they've done it now, but it'll be well before it's all back in place. The only improvement that was important for two weeks or whatever it was was to getting that getting that ship off from blocking the whole thing.

Reed:

Right.

Derek:

Right? And you could drive faster in the Indian Ocean or the Mediterranean Sea or whatever, but once you got to the Suez Canal

Reed:

We're stopping.

Derek:

We're moving. So so that's a that's a well, a very large constraint, if you wanna put it that way. Mhmm. But every every system has, you know, one unless it moves around, is a worse situation. But if any situation there's system, there's one factor that limits your production.

Derek:

And if you don't improve that, you don't get more production. That's the definition of what it is. So what management's job then, if you think about, you know, assembly line in a factory and people are working away, management's job is to say, oh, stuff's piling in front up in front of that station. That's the constraint. We gotta run that machine in into overtime through the night.

Derek:

We gotta fire up our second machine. We gotta speed it up. We gotta do something so that we can break this constraint, Get the product flowing again and get more products out out the door. So management does that, but what happens is, now you have the next slowest thing in your system, which you may not know what it is. Right.

Derek:

Until it becomes apparent and now you have the new constraint. And so you now have to deal with the new constraint.

Reed:

The new constraint is something blocking the canal up ahead?

Derek:

Sure. Sure. And maybe now the new constraint is that there is a global shortage of whatever kind of fuel

Reed:

Was being plugged.

Derek:

Boats used. I don't even know what it is, but diesel or something. And so you rush to solve that constraint. And then the next one pops up. Or maybe something breaks that wasn't a constraint before and now it goes to the top of the line.

Derek:

So so in a complex system, you fix a constraint, there's another one. You fix that one, there's another one. So when we talk about the ultimate constraint of an organization, it's management's capacity to break the constraints. And and so if management has only so much time and attention, then that's gonna limit how much improvement they can lay on the organization. And so, Ellie Goldrat's, theory or statement is that the ultimate constraint of any organisation is management attention.

Derek:

It's the ability and the capacity of management to spend time on something that's gonna determine whether that part improves or doesn't. I just find that a fascinating concept and I wanted to talk about it today.

Reed:

So if the manager is not attentive, that's a constraint in of itself?

Derek:

Sure. Or if you're you're focused on the wrong thing.

Reed:

Management is concerned with a particular party who is three cubicles away from me, and management is really paying attention to him, which means I can slack off.

Derek:

Yes. Yes. Yes. You can. And then what happens is if your if your production slows down Mhmm.

Derek:

Then, you know, maybe management figures it out. But maybe it's only it's only slowed down in total and they don't know where it comes from. So then they have to investigate. And, there's this process that goes on. And how many times a day can they do that, especially if you and your buddy are taking terms of having naps?

Derek:

Right. Right? So so management's ability to focus on the right stuff and to solve problems quickly is the limits, the capacity of organizations to grow and perform better.

Reed:

That's great. So how can management be more attentive, Derek?

Derek:

Well, there's a there's a couple of things. One of them is, and this this would speak to senior management. We've been talking about middle managers a little bit in some of our recent episodes. A lot of times, pays attention to things that they don't need to pay attention to. You know?

Derek:

And we've, I think, little bit talked about the concept of micromanaging.

Reed:

Yes.

Derek:

In in one sense, micromanaging is doing the job of another employee.

Reed:

Without delegation.

Derek:

Right. So if if they have the tools they need, if they have the training they need, and we have a way of, like, evaluating output, let them run. And and don't manage the process. Just manage the or don't manage the person. Just manage the inputs and, you know, check the outputs.

Derek:

And so a lot of times managers want to know what's going on. They wanna, like, poke here and there, spending a lot of attention on literally the wrong thing, which does two things. One, whatever they touch probably is worse if they're micromanaging. And second, they're not looking at the the thing that they should be fixing in the organization because they don't have time because of what they're what they're spending time on. So so there is that idea of management attention in any system is limited.

Derek:

There's a limited amount of it. So whatever you do, don't spend it on the wrong stuff. And then the second thing would be how do we stop the flow of all these things coming to management that require attention? So one thing is why don't you pick your constraint?

Reed:

Pick your constraint.

Derek:

So rather than bouncing around and seeing what pops up, you you actively manage the system so that there's one constraint that you use to control the whole system. And that's not necessarily easy to do. Mhmm. But let's say, for example, I'm trying to think of something that's maybe a little bit more more timely right now. So I think this next year, people are gonna want to spend a lot of money on their homes.

Reed:

Do? Okay.

Derek:

Like, just as an example, house prices are going up. People have been, you know, sort of saving this cash that they haven't used for traveling. Everybody now realizes that they need a home office. Mhmm. Maybe they need to knock out a wall or something like that.

Derek:

So so let's say that there's a increased demand for home rental companies, home rental home renovation services. Yes. So a wise operator might say, I got two crews. I'm not gonna have five crews.

Reed:

Right.

Derek:

I'm gonna have two crews. I'm gonna sell enough to keep two crews busy. I'm gonna bid on the most interesting projects. I'm gonna charge, you know, a good rate. And so my constraint is I have two crews.

Derek:

Somebody else might say, I really wanna grow this thing so I'm gonna buy a bunch of trucks and hire a bunch of people. Then they're gonna find their constraint is how many jobs can I get?

Reed:

And then if by by buying more equipment, they are kind of obligating themselves to get more jobs.

Derek:

Right. So now they have this cost base that goes up and and then they they're really pushed to sales really hard and then they get more jobs than they can handle. And so they do what contractors do to all of us, which is start.

Reed:

And then say we'll be done and we'll be done next Tuesday.

Derek:

So they they demolish so that they gotcha. Mhmm. And then they start doing some other stuff. And that way, you're stuck with them and you gotta wait. So that brings me to another thing that we said we might talk about, which is bad multitasking.

Reed:

Okay. So I really want to hear about this because I think I do this. Really, the only thing I've really mastered in my entire career is procrastination.

Derek:

Yeah.

Reed:

I I would teach something about that, but I haven't really found that.

Derek:

I've got around to. Yeah. Yeah. So so on the on the con on the concept of bad multitasking in the rental company we're talking about, if if they came to your house and did demo on day one and started on day two

Reed:

Right.

Derek:

You know, it's a five day job. K. But what they do is they demolish your place on day one, someone else's place on day two, someone else's place on day three. Now they got six or seven or eight projects on the go. The truck's always at the wrong location.

Reed:

Yes. Right? Yes.

Derek:

The crew doesn't have the material. The flooring doesn't come in, but it's at site two, but they're at site five. And and then there's the driving back and forth between the sites. And all of those things mean that if if one job takes five days, five days five jobs doesn't take twenty five days, it takes fifty days.

Reed:

Yeah. Yeah.

Derek:

So that's one way of looking at bad multitasking. The other thing that, you know, we're talking a little bit before we jumped into this is that kind of personal multitasking at your own desk.

Reed:

Yes.

Derek:

And so now I think what we're gonna do is move, as we often do from the business world to the personal world.

Reed:

Right. So That's that's really where I can help.

Derek:

So so the ultimate constraint of an organization is management's capacity to pay attention to something. And the ultimate constraint of a person is that person's capacity to stay on task and do do the most important things. So multitasking has a bunch of, negative effects. And one of them is that so much of what we do now requires concentration. It requires mental effort.

Derek:

And I think in our earlier podcast, we talked a little bit about getting into that flow state.

Reed:

Yes. Yes. Yes. I remember.

Derek:

Yeah. Yeah. And we talked about that in terms of, you know, a theatrical performance, sports. Sometimes when I'm doing, you know, thought work, I get into flow. Mhmm.

Derek:

You don't even know how much time's passed. You're just like all on fire. Every time you drop what you're doing and pick something else up, you you not only cut off the flow, but you make it hard to get it back again. And so here we are. I mean, I'm sitting right now.

Derek:

We're on Zoom. I've got, a screen with you guys on it, on my big screen. Below that, I got my laptop screen with, you know, the topic. I have, my my phone, which is my timer for this episode. I've got some papers.

Derek:

I got my fidget toy. One click away from Google, one click away from YouTube, my email, like, we are sitting on these, like, distraction time bombs.

Reed:

Yes. Yes.

Derek:

And I gotta tell you that before I had any of this, I had a really, really short attention span.

Reed:

Oh, now are you saying you you expanded your attention span by having more distractions?

Derek:

No. I'm just saying that, I didn't even need distractions to be distracted.

Reed:

I see.

Derek:

And then on top of that, we're just layer on these things. And then you got stuff that pings at you, you know, notifications and stuff. Right? So so this idea of of multitasking is, so important because even if we don't set out to multitask, we end up multitasking.

Reed:

You bet. You bet. And

Derek:

so here's some things that I've learned about, like, what you can do. First of all, I ran into this thing called a pomodoro timer.

Reed:

A cheese timer?

Derek:

So pomodoro is Italian for tomato.

Reed:

Oh, tomato. Pomodaro. Tomato. Yeah. That's what you said.

Reed:

I misheard you.

Derek:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I probably said it all wrong. But anyway, so Pomodaro timer is somebody invented it from the kitchen timer that his mom had that was a tomato that you spun halfway around and

Reed:

then it Sure. Sure.

Derek:

So so the the practice then is you start your twenty five minute timer and you put your nose to the grindstone and you do the thing that you need to do for twenty five minutes. No checking email, no YouTube, no getting a snack. Just do your thing for only twenty five minutes. Then you take a five minute break and then you dive back in. So I've used that a few times.

Derek:

When I'm doing stuff where it's creative and I I'm trying to solve a problem or trying to figure out mostly, you know, how to explain something to a client

Reed:

Yes.

Derek:

And twenty five minutes, you can do it. You know, if I say I'm gonna focus all after I got four hours. I'm gonna focus all afternoon. I'm not gonna do it. But twenty five minutes I mean, you gotta do a little work to eliminate the distractions, you know, and say for twenty five minutes, I'm you know, they're they're off and then and then you dive in.

Derek:

So I think I

Reed:

that's great.

Derek:

One of the things I think that's really interesting about that is that it's only twenty five minutes.

Reed:

Right.

Derek:

Which I don't know. Tell me about television. Is there something magic about twenty five minutes? Is that a thing?

Reed:

Well, from a from an advertiser's point of view, it's it's actually twenty three minutes, twenty two. Mhmm. But it's but yeah, I love what you're saying, putting twenty five minutes on the clock and saying, for these twenty five minutes, I can stand being focused on one thing. When I was writing in television, we were always in a hurry. Always in a hurry.

Reed:

There was so much pressure to get it done now. But when I'm at home, I find myself easily distracted. I find my apartment getting clean best when I have a deadline on a writing project Oh, absolutely. Because even though cleaning may be low on my priority list, it gets lifted because I don't wanna write even more than I don't wanna

Derek:

clean. So Reid, thanks for bringing that up because that brings me to this other concept that I just became aware of. There's a book called Indistractable, And it's by a guy named Nir Eyal, and I don't know how to pronounce his name. Mhmm. But we'll put it in our notes.

Derek:

And his his work is on the fact that the opposite of distraction is traction.

Reed:

Ah.

Derek:

And so if we're pulling, if we're going someplace, that's the place we wanna go and distraction is all the stuff that takes us away from that. And he starts, I think if I have this right, with those inner distractions. And and really what it is is, you know, and this happens to me. I don't like hard things. I don't like thinking of things I haven't thought of before.

Derek:

I mean, I like it but it's hard. Yeah. And so if I have a choice of doing something else, like literally anything else, that's where my mind goes. And so if you if you can kinda train your brain to focus on the thing that you're trying to focus on by recognizing that you're being tugged someplace else and saying, that's not what I wanna do right now and then going back to your task. I think there's I think there's something powerful there.

Derek:

And so between

Reed:

Very much so.

Derek:

That practice and Pomodoro over the last couple of weeks, a couple of months, I've had some really great productive sessions.

Reed:

I'm gonna try it, Derek, and I'm gonna report back and see how I do. Twenty five minutes, I can do that.

Derek:

Can we do that?

Reed:

Yeah. We can do that.

Derek:

So the other thing that we know people can do for less than twenty five minutes is listen to one of these podcasts

Reed:

That's right.

Derek:

And with rapt attention.

Reed:

And be a better person for it. Absolutely. That's that's I think that's what the kind of feedback we're getting is that we're improving the world over. And that's a pretty good place. Derek, where do people find you?

Derek:

So what I want them to do is finish what they're working on and then go to the worldwide web and type in derekhudson.ca. But don't just do it while you're in the middle of something because that

Reed:

would be distracting. During the five minute break.

Derek:

That's right. Derekhudson.ca.

Reed:

That's right. Brynne Griffiths is our studio engineer. Derek Hudson is our guru in charge of essential dynamics. And I'm Reed McCollum in charge of procrastination and those five minutes. I hope you're well, and until next time, consider your quest.