Calibrate your sense of others’ bottlenecks

A great way to be effective is to figure out what others’ bottlenecks are, then solve them. I’ll leave the second half (solving them) for a different post; this post lays out some tips on calibrating your sense of others’ bottlenecks.

1. write out/think through some predictions of what you think someone’s bottlenecks are
2. ask them what their bottlenecks are, without mentioning the prediction you already did
3. to the extent that your prediction was different from their answer, figure out:
   1. what their real bottleneck actually is (hint: this usually involves at least a 10m conversation with a few questions)
   2. what the difference between your prediction and their bottleneck is
4. to the extent that they were similar, try especially hard on (5)
5. try to figure out if they have bottlenecks they aren’t sharing because e.g. they aren’t legally allowed to, they don’t feel socially comfortable sharing, they’re not even aware it’s a bottleneck, etc
6. repeat until calibrated :)

A lot of this also works on yourself, and I do recommend trying it on yourself. But I’ve found that people are by-default more capable at identifying their own bottlenecks than they are at autonomously finding others’ bottlenecks.

You should also note that this process applies straightforwardly to organizations: I strongly encourage you to apply this process straightforwardly to organizations, particularly if you’re keen on “getting shit done” (more precisely, “have the organization get shit done”) as opposed to “playing office politics” or some other goal.

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