Possible areas to explore for problem-solving:

• Expertise (engineering, business, science, ...)
  • Specialty within expertise (in business: accounting, marketing, finance, ...)
    • Area with specialty (in marketing: research, strategy, pricing, ...)
  • Politics (international, national, state, local)
    • Social issues (poverty, climate change, immigration, ...)
    • The economy (employment, inflation, debt, GDP, ...)
  • Industries (medicine, software, retail, manufacturing, ...
  • Domain (work, home, community, organizations, religion)

Once you have identified an area that both interests you and in which you have some knowledge and expertise, use the ideas presenting in the Theory of Constraints in the following steps:

1. Briefly describe the area that will be the focus of your work. (1-2 sentences)
2. Theory of Constraints
   1. Identify "The Goal" of your chosen area (meaning "for what purpose does the area exist?"...for an entire company this is typically profit). Be careful not to choose a goal that is too specific, the optimization of which could lead to local improvement at the expense of the performance of the whole system. Instead, try to identify the goal of the whole system you are trying to improve. For example, in a factory, the goal is not to get the highest output from one bottleneck in the factory, but to get the highest output of the whole factory. Alternatively, in a customer service center, the goal is not to make every customer as satisfied as possible, but rather to maximize the long-term profits of the firm.
   2. Given the goal you have identified, identify at least three candidates that you believe are strong contenders for the constraint/bottleneck of the area (the aspect of the area that you believe most limits progress toward the goal).
   3. Choose which contender from Step 2 that you believe to be the constraint of the system and suggest how to exploit it, how to subordinate other parts of the system to it, and how to elevate it.