I really believe in the power of incremental progress. It’s one of my company values. It’s the name of my weekly show (Wednesdays at 11:45 am Mountain Time on Facebook). It’s how we find evidence that we’re fulfilling our dreams.
However, there are times a whole bunch of incremental progress in different areas will come together all at once and yield great results.
It’s rare, but it does happen.
In business, this can happen when you unlock a whole strata of constrained systems at once.
That’s a pretty dense concept, so let me unpack it.
All businesses are made up of systems. They have inputs and outputs. In a perfect world, the input would equal the output.
Sadly, just as the real world has friction, the business world has its own inefficiencies that take the input of a system and give a reduced output. And when those inefficiencies pile up within a system, you get something that takes far more than it gives.
Maybe you have a department working with old, unreliable technology. Maybe your sales team are using out-dated techniques. I could come up with dozens to hundreds of examples. Often times, solving systematic constraints in your business will give you greater results than building new ones. And that’s the key to punctuated progress.
