More Capacity, More Waiting

At my last gig we split the work across two boards. A Kitting board, where we chased down the questions, dependencies, decisions, and acceptance conditions that would otherwise stall a story once it was already in flight. And a Flow board, where work could actually move, because the kitting had cleared the path ahead of it. We weren’t trying to kill uncertainty. We were trying to get avoidable waiting out of the active delivery system.

It reminded me of the old lesson from The Goal: adding capacity anywhere but the real constraint doesn’t buy you throughput. It buys you inventory. Generated code waiting for review. Pull requests waiting on a decision. Features waiting for integration. Internal tools waiting for anyone to adopt them. Activity climbs. Owned outcomes don’t.

So I built a little thing called Leverage Lab to poke at it: an interactive simulator where you add capacity, move the constraint around, and watch a perfectly sensible intervention quietly make the flow worse. It isn’t an operating model. It’s a thinking tool. (Fair warning, same as I gave on LinkedIn: you’ll hit some AI slop. I build these for my own amusement, and every so often one feels worth sharing.)