LearnGlossary
Glossary
Fourteen terms, one line each. The same definitions appear as tooltips inside your session.
- Constraint
- The one thing that limits how much your whole business produces right now. There is only one at a time.
- Bottleneck
- Any step with less capacity than the demand on it. You can have several; only one of them is the constraint.
- Throughput
- The rate at which the business turns work into money: sales minus truly variable costs, per period.
- UDE (undesirable effect)
- A symptom you can observe and prove is bad for the goal, stated as a present-tense fact. UDEs are effects, not causes.
- Root cause
- The policy, belief or physical limit you control that sits underneath most of your symptoms. Usually one, rarely two.
- Injection
- A new condition you will make true to turn a symptom into its opposite. A state, not a project.
- Necessary condition
- Something that must be true for a critical success factor to hold. Concrete enough to measure today.
- Critical success factor
- One of the three to five outcomes that must all be true or the goal fails.
- Exploit
- Get the most out of the constraint without spending money: never idle, never on the wrong work, always fed.
- Subordinate
- Re-tune everything else to serve the constraint, even if that makes other parts look less efficient.
- Elevate
- Add capacity to the constraint: hire, buy, build, automate. Only after exploiting and subordinating.
- Evaporating cloud
- A diagram of a conflict between two things you need. Find the false assumption under one arrow and the conflict disappears.
- Negative branch
- The "yes, but…" chain from an injection to a new problem. Trim it with another injection or accept it knowingly.
- Gate
- A dated checkpoint with a number that must be hit, plus what you do if it passes and what you do if it fails.