Sublime

Any improvement made after the bottleneck is useless, because it will always remain starved, waiting for work from the bottleneck. And any improvements made before the bottleneck merely results in more inventory piling up at the bottleneck.”

A system has a chain-link logic when its performance is limited by its weakest subunit, or “link.” When there is a weak link, a chain is not made stronger by strengthening the other links.

Prigogine realized that although Boltzmann’s theory was correct, it did not apply to what we observe on Earth because our planet is an out-of-equilibrium pocket inside a larger system—the universe—that is moving toward equilibrium.

Hence, we are more likely to accept a dangerous idea if it aligns with our own experiences and is supported by the people we value.

Bungay argues that friction creates three gaps. First, a knowledge gap arises when we engage in planning or acting due to the necessarily imperfect state of the information we have to hand, and our need to making assumptions and interpret that information. Second, an alignment gap is the result of people failing to do things as planned, perhaps due