If you feel like your organization is running in place, you're not alone. Many leaders I work with are convinced they have a dozen critical problems that all need to be fixed yesterday. Their teams are overworked, their initiatives feel disconnected, and progress has stalled, leaving everyone frustrated and burning out. They believe the solution lies in working harder, adding more resources, or launching yet another "transformational" project. But after 20 years and working with hundreds of organizations, I can tell you the problem is almost never the engine; it's the steering. The real issue is a fundamental misunderstanding of where to focus.
The key to unlocking systemic growth is to stop trying to improve everything at once and instead find the one part of your system that dictates the pace for everyone else. In my work, we call this the Pace Point. This is not just a nicer-sounding word for a "bottleneck." A bottleneck is a problem to be eliminated; a Pace Point is a strategic asset to be maximized. It is the single most valuable resource in your entire operation because its capacity sets the capacity of the whole system. That means that any "improvement" made anywhere other than the Pace Point is just an illusion. It creates no real value and is, frankly, a waste of time, money, and morale.
Finding your Pace Point is the first step toward trading chaos for clarity. So, how do you spot it? It's simpler than you think, and it doesn't require a complex analysis. Take five minutes right now and ask yourself and your team this one question: "Where does work consistently pile up?" Look for the digital (or physical) stack of work waiting for a specific person, team, or machine. That pile-up isn't a sign of failure; it's a giant, flashing arrow, likely pointed directly at your Pace Point.
Once you've found it, your mission becomes radically simplified. You no longer have a hundred problems; you have one priority. Your job is to coordinate the entire organization to ensure that the Pace Point is never starved for work, never idle, and only works on the most valuable things. By focusing all your improvement energy there, you don't just improve a single step—you elevate the output of the entire business with the resources you already have.