“How does that go in there?”
When I was in a ship museum recently with my kids, we came across a selection of really impressive ships in a bottle. We spent a long time discussing how to get a fully rigged ship, with so many intricate details and an obvious size mismatch, inside that bottle.
It had to go through that bottleneck. But how?
Turns out that these ship-in-a-bottle craftsmen design the ship’s body slightly smaller than the neck. The entire rigging including sails is fixed on mini-hinges so that they can be folded on top of the deck. After adding blue sand for the ocean you carefully ease the ship through the neck. Then you lift the rigging by pulling attached strings, and voilà: a full-fledged three-masted ship in a bottle. The magnifying effect of the rounded glass certainly enhances the impression.
Nobody widens the neck.
That is the entire craft. You do not enlarge the opening to fit the ship. You reshape the ship to pass through the opening, and you restore it to full form on the other side. It is not that the bottleneck disappears, but that you change the ship going through. We often spend enormous energy trying to widen the opening. Sometimes the faster solution is to change what we are trying to pass through it. In other words: you don’t fight the constraints, you work with them.
That is also a fair description of what I do in an operating room. Much of reconstructive surgery is the work of moving through a small incision to rebuild something large underneath, which often feels like painting a room through the keyhole.
I recently joined a business retreat where we discussed bottlenecks. We spent a lot of time on how to identify, name, and tackle the most limiting one. I do think this is a valid approach in many circumstances. But I couldn’t help thinking about why bottles have necks in the first place. Without them, bottles would just be glass cans. We designed necks to control flow while pouring, a timeless mechanism to reduce speed and volume.
That means not every bottleneck is a flaw. Some constraints exist because they create order, precision, or quality. But as with many good things, overdone or context dependent, they can turn into obstacles.
So the real work is not removing every bottleneck. It is recognizing which one it is: the constraint that holds something together, or the one that has outlived its purpose. That judgment is hard enough with the bottlenecks you can see. It gets much harder when the bottleneck is not external but internal, because the ones pointing at yourself rarely look like constraints at all. They feel like facts about who you are.
The real bottleneck is often you
There are areas in our lives where an identified external bottleneck can be more or less easily fixed by changing workflows or hiring more personnel. That is the common way of looking at bottlenecks. But what about those circumstances where the bottleneck is you? You can’t always workflow yourself out of it, and if you try, you keep hitting the wall and asking yourself why.
As a department head, researcher, educator at two universities, writer, and family man, I’ve seen that in many cases I am the bottleneck. The superficial solution is to do less. While that may help in some areas, it’s not universal. The simple reason: we tend to see time as the main bottleneck factor, but it often isn’t. For me, the issue often isn’t time. It’s missing information, waiting for input, or lack of understanding. Those are external bottlenecks. Real, but usually visible.
But there are more subtle ones, rarely discussed: personality traits like avoidance. I realized things often stalled because I didn’t do what I promised. Superficially it seemed like a time-management issue. Looking deeper, I saw I hadn’t written to a particular person because I feared their reaction and avoided the conflict. These are the tasks that move from one day to the next, from one list to the other. Every time I opened my inbox I saw that draft sitting there. Every time I found a reason to postpone it.
These internal bottlenecks come in many shapes and forms. Decisions not taken, information withheld, topics not followed up on because of emotional roadblocks. Maybe for you it’s not avoidance. Maybe it’s fear of losing control, or people pleasing, or something else. Think of them as ships that were never folded properly for the passage.
It is here that I have learned to take my time, disassemble the whole thing, and put it back together in that wonderfully smart way, with rigging and sails and everything, so that it can unfold once we’re through the passage. Realizing my avoidance and reflecting on it helped me put these concerns directly into that unwritten mail, and the conversation turned out far less dramatic than the version I had rehearsed in my head. Before typing a single word, I had to sit with the discomfort and resist the urge to tiptoe away. The email is never the problem. The imagined future is.
Unsure whether the bottleneck is a trait or a system, external or internal? Ask: if a trusted peer took your role, would the constraint remain? If not, you’re likely the bottleneck. That is not necessarily bad news, because unlike market conditions, regulations, or other people, it is something you can actually work on, an area where you have full agency.
So, next time you face a bottleneck, ask: is this about flow, or am I shipwrecked? Use a magnifying glass and look beneath the surface of what you thought the problem was. Ask why it isn’t happening, and because of whom. The answer may be a broken system. But occasionally it is the version of yourself that still refuses to send the email. If it’s structural, fix it as best you can. But if it is you, and in my experience that is more common than we like to admit, then start there first.
To more in life,
Nicco
