The Bottleneck Podcast Clarke Ching with Rory Sutherland and Elfried Samba on bottlenecks, leadership and progress
18 snips
Jan 13, 2026 
Clarke Ching, author and consultant on bottlenecks, joins Rory Sutherland and Elfried Samba to explore the unseen hurdles to progress. They discuss how leaders can unintentionally become constraints and the importance of re-routing work away from bottlenecks. Clarke shares insights on the psychological aspects of systems thinking and the necessity of a shift from scarcity to abundance. The trio also highlights creative solutions and the critical need for a detective mindset in identifying and resolving these hidden challenges for effective leadership.
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Small Levers, Big Effects
- Bottlenecks are the single points where small changes produce outsized results.
- Fixing the obvious problem often moves the bottleneck elsewhere, so you must find where flow actually constrains output.
When Solving One Bottleneck Bankrupts You
- Eli Goldratt fixed a production bottleneck and flooded the market with unsellable goods.
- The real constraint moved downstream to sales, causing his uncle's business to fail.
Psychology Meets Systems
- Combining systems thinking and psychology reveals better solutions than either alone.
- Rory uses pharmacists' prescribing power as an example that changes downstream demand and patient behaviour.
