Growth feels unstoppable until it stops.
You’ve mapped the strategy. Built the team. Secured the funding. But something still chokes your momentum.
Most leaders seek more resources, better processes, or smarter people, but they’re solving the wrong problem.
Eliyahu Goldratt understood this. His Theory of Constraints revealed a truth that disrupts how we think about scaling: every system has one constraint that governs its entire throughput. Not three constraints. Not five. One.
Your organization is a chain. The weakest link determines everything.
But here’s what trips up most executives: constraints hide in plain sight. They masquerade as everyday business challenges. A bottleneck in approvals. A key person who’s overwhelmed. A process that worked at 50 people but breaks at 150.
The constraint doesn’t announce itself. It whispers through missed deadlines, frustrated customers, and teams that feel stuck despite working harder.
Finding your constraint requires brutal honesty. Look where work piles up, decisions stall, and the same problems resurface monthly.
Once you spot it, resist the urge to work around it. That’s what creates more constraints downstream.
Instead, elevate it, give it resources, redesign processes around it, and make everything else subordinate to optimizing this single chokepoint.
When you break one constraint, another will emerge. That’s not failure. That’s progress.
Most organizations try to fix everything at once. Smart ones fix the one thing that fixes everything else.
Your constraint is already there, governing your growth rate. The question isn’t whether it exists. The question is whether you’ll find it before it finds you.
