Been wondering lately that given everyone has a consultant with all the world’s knowledge in their pockets, we should be seeing efficiency rise across the board everywhere.
Literally everyone can now get personalised advise on how to serve their customers better, improve quality of their outputs, cut inefficiencies and increase revenue.
.. yet, this is nowhere to be seen (especially for small local businesses).
Why aren’t we seeing the rate of change accelerate in the world?
One possible explanation is inertia, and there’s some truth to that. But perhaps a better explanation is that perhaps advice was never a bottleneck.
Maybe implementation was?
Or perhaps most businesses are already in their local optima and any change is too risky for them to bear?
This, of course, is theory of constraints and it explains a lot: when outputs are a result of many factors, when one factor is made efficient, what holds back output is the slowest changing factor.
Mathematically explained:
A = Advice quality (AI, consultants, knowledge)
I = Implementation ability (execution, skills, time)
R = Risk tolerance (willingness to change)
T = Tools/infrastructure (systems, capital)
Output=f(A,I,R,T)
Let's assume "A" is the dominant variable here and "I" is least dominat variable.
If A>min(I,R,T), then ∂A/∂(Output)=0
Changes would probably happen at the same pace because the number of people who make changes happen are still the same and would always the the same