Kaizen Thought: Awareness is the starting point of control.
“If you can see it, you can manage it. If not, it’s managing you.“
I’ve been listening to the book The Bottleneck Rules: How to Get More Done (When Working Harder Isn’t Working), and this line really stuck with me.
In every system—whether it’s a business, a workflow, a team, or even our own minds—there’s always a moment when things start to slow down. Work piles up. Progress gets stuck. And the frustrating part is… we don’t always know why.
Then, we spot it. The bottleneck.
And as strange as it sounds, it may be invisible one minute… and then painfully obvious the next.
This shift happens because once we finally understand where the slowdown is coming from, we can’t unsee it. Once we learn about something, it’s hard to remember what it felt like not to know. And THIS is where progress becomes possible.
The moment we see the problem clearly—really see it for what it is, where it lives, and how it affects the system—we gain the ability to do something about it.
The quote “If you can see it, you can manage it” is a call to self-awareness, to observation, to curiosity.
It urges us to slow down just long enough to examine what’s really going on. It’s a reminder that awareness is the starting point of control.
We can’t fix what we can’t see, we can’t improve a process that’s operating in the dark. It all begins with clarity. Once we understand where a process breaks down, it prompts us to move and take charge.
We take a moment to pause, and pay attention to what’s really happening—not just reacting, but observing with intention.
Because the moment we truly see a bottleneck, we begin the work of changing it—we take back control.
And once we’re back in the driver’s seat, things will begin to flow again.
