As a process improvement practitioner, I never cease to be amazed at the extent to which ideas developed for industrial and business settings seem so fit for personal application. In this article I will consider one of the major process improvement movements and show how its methods may be of value to individuals seeking to do better, reach higher, go further and achieve a greater degree of personal success than they might otherwise do.

The key idea of the theory is that businesses are best viewed as whole systems rather than collections of independent components. Like a chain which is only as strong as its weakest link, the achievement of the system as a whole is limited by the least able of its component parts known the system constraint. No matter how efficiently other parts operate, the throughput cannot be improved. This sounds like John Maxwells Law of the Lid in his 21 Laws of Leadership. Your strengths determine your possibilities. Your weaknesses determine your actual achievement unless you find ways to reduce or eliminate their impact.

Application:
Your life, affairs, pursuits and concerns constitute a system, the various parts of which affect one another. The recent attention paid to life-work balance issues recognises this inter-dependence. Take a hard honest look at yourself from time to time. Examine various aspects of your life to determine what it is that is holding you from peak performance and contribution to life. Because various areas of your life are inextricably linked, you can gain plenty of leverage by seeking out and improving your weakest areas.

For example among qualities you need to succeed anywhere are determination and perseverance, integrity, self and time management skills. Say you find that your inability to persevere and stay the course is putting a ceiling on your possibilities. How would you apply these ideas?

The Theory of Constraints advocates a five step solution sequence as follows:

Locate the constraint: This you have done. Emphasis is on the combined use of intuition and logic to locate the true source of your limitations.

Exploit the constraint: This means that, in view of the limitations imposed by the constraint, you should still find ways to be more effective. In the current example about persistence, this might mean getting a coach or someone else to whom you can be accountable. You could also seek other forms of support to help keep you on track.

Subordinate Everything to the Above Decision: Do everything you do keeping in view your decision to improve your effectiveness in spite of a poor record of persistence. This might mean distancing yourself from people who hold a negative sway over you and encourage you to doubt yourself, and take the easy way out.

Elevate the constraint: Find ways to improve yourself and increase your ability in your area of weakness. For a problem with perseverance, you might find it useful to meditate and visualise. It would also help to maintain a journal in which you track your decisions and your reasons for not sticking to them. You could also read biographies of characters that were known for their persistence in the face of odds. The biographies of most people who achieved noteworthy greatness would probably qualify. Set goals for a minimum number of attempts or length of time before you give up on anything youre attempting.

Start again. Avoid inertia: If truly you succeed in elevating the constraint sufficiently, you soon find that perseverance is no longer a problem for you, and your level of achievement has improved considerably. What next? You must go back to the beginning. Take another hard, honest look at yourself to determine what now limits your ability to achieve as you could.

As in business and industry, application of the above ideas to improving yourself is best done from a long term perspective. Thoroughly applied, it could lead to major shifts in direction as you overcome one performance constraint after another.