Wisdom From the High Chair
When my daughter stood her ground
It was one of those warm spring days, the scent of lilac on the breeze, so rare in Massachusetts, when Zoe turned her head, and with a firm determination, pushed my hand away. For some reason, when feeding both of my daughters in their high chairs, I wouldn’t wait for them to finish swallowing the last spoonful before I was offering the next. Recalling that period of my life, I was also doing this to myself, inhaling my lunch during the half hour break allowed for me and my fellow elementary school teachers. I’m so proud that her agency was intact enough to manage her father’s less than ideal feeding behavior.
You’ve heard us talk about being masters of sitting and squatting from the days we taught ourselves to walk. We’ve lamented that lost mastery as an undesired effect of conventional chairs. My daughter in her high chair was demonstrating another domain of mastery that my food trough eating habits prove I had lost. Namely, our agency to say, “No” when presented with more than we can process. I was piling up food at a pace Zoe knew her mouth and body couldn’t consume. Even before our current era of AI slop, inboxes and social media feeds have been overflowing with more than we can humanely process.
At the same time, undistributed wealth has been wastefully piling up behind oligarchs.
This has been labeled as a mark of success while the soils and species of our planet strain to recover from their extractive frenzy. I hope to show how the starvation downstream from this obscene wealth inequality can be understood through a wisdom we already possess. A wisdom that every family lovingly follows every time a magnificent constraint enters their midst with the arrival of a newborn.
I wish for all of us to reclaim that same confidence Zoe had. Before the age of one. She knew to signal “Enough” even before she had the language for it. In this post I hope to convince you that the solutions for so many of our social and environmental challenges have been at hand all along, and it’s as simple as embracing the role of the bottleneck, the constraint. I invite you to evaluate that role in a new light, and reclaim your birthright as a pace setter rather than assembly line chaser.
Speaking of assembly lines, in the process of going from Soul Seat prototype to setting up our factory and network of artisans and suppliers, I learned a lot about Work In Progress, or WIP for short. Like the pureed carrots I presented to my daughter's chewing face, piles of unprocessed WIP, is a classic sign of bad management. She was right to give me that defiant look, and push my hand away. It was not in her interest to chew and swallow any faster trying to meet my arbitrary pace. Making that mistake on myself during my lunch breaks, was showing up downstream in poor digestion. Just because I could inhale my food, didn’t mean it was the right thing to do. And then I regretfully saw the effects of my bad policy, surfacing further downstream in my daughter’s mealtime.
If you’ve had enough already, and don’t want to finish the rest of this long post, I’ll offer just one more spoonful.
The goal of this essay is to argue that the enormous pile of accumulated wealth upstream of our daily lives, is also a version of toxic WIP. It shouldn’t be a source of awe and deference when someone becomes a billionaire. It’s a signal of failed management of resources at best, a sign of gross corruption at worst. There are numerous policy bottlenecks that are upstream of our current struggles with affordability. Follow the money upstream and we’ll find them wherever the WIP of wealth is piling up. Why else would the oligarchs feel they need to stash it away, off-shore and out of sight?
In the language of Constraint Management, a pile of WIP needs to be addressed because one of the symptoms is starvation of everything that is downstream from the pileup. Think of what the highway looks like when cars are piled up behind an accident. Throughput slows, and unintended consequences cascade in each direction, upstream and down. Teachers, students waiting for their ride, the risk of more accidents upstream.
If you do a better job than I did of managing your gut microbiome, or you have mastered the complex overlapping social schedules of a busy family, then you already have a keen understanding of complex system dynamics. Don’t let the jargon of the field fool you. The rest of this post lays out in more detail why we all get to say no to more shoveling from upstream. I hope the recognition of this mastery empowers each of us to proudly claim our place as a bottleneck or constraint. I hope we can begin to see ourselves and our communities as one of the most important nodes of the systems we’re part of. In systems parlance, the constraint is the pace setter. The rest of the system needs to subordinate its activity to the pace that is healthiest and most sustainable for the constraint. All families willingly do this when an infant arrives. The infant, the pace setter, won’t have it otherwise.
Our economic system needs to do the same.
The oligarchs shouldn’t be the ones setting the pace. Their accumulation of wealth has the same corrosive effect of WIP piled in front of a factory's bottleneck. Our healthy soils, our healthy communities and families should be the pace makers, not the markets chasing the hoarders of capital. For the manager of a system (as young Zoe showed that all of us are), the bottleneck needs to be identified, supported, monitored and paced so that the rest of the system is tuned to its rhythm, not the bottleneck straining to catch up. This is as true for robotic, mechanised systems (where the principles were first discovered) as it is for project based organizations that deliver services such as a hospital or healthcare system.
Because all complex systems are dynamic and ever changing, the location of the bottleneck rarely stays in the same location. There are two main take-aways I hope you’ll experiment with. One, that if you’re the bottleneck or someone you know is, the bottleneck's value to the system is enormous and you absolutely deserve support. Everything in your organization should be focused on keeping you from distraction, keeping you well within your healthy working range, and to never let work pile up on you. You, the bottleneck, are the pace setter for the entire organization and should be duly compensated and supported.The second takeaway is equally controversial. If you aren’t the bottleneck, you have permission to not engage in performative busyness. If you have a manager who measures productivity by who is in their seat, who looks busy, they don’t deserve the title.
The thing about bottlenecks that many people outside of manufacturing don’t know, is that non-bottlenecks have important roles to play as well.
Being idle is of value if you are not the bottleneck, particularly if slowing down your pace will improve the performance of the bottleneck. Consider the sourdough baker. The starter (a living culture of wild yeasts and bacteria), sets the pace of the entire kitchen. You cannot hurry fermentation. The baker's whole day is subordinated to the cycle of that yeast culture. Flour gets measured, pans get seasoned, the oven gets loaded with wood, all of it timed not just to a production schedule but to the readiness of a living system. What may look like idleness is actually attentive preparation. The culture is the constraint, and the skilled baker knows their job is to keep conditions right and stay ready. Zoe's gut knew this before she had words for it. So does healthy living soil, which sets the pace of genuinely nourishing food when we allow it. The grain futures markets don’t make good bread, the microbiome in the soil and then the autonomous agents of the yeast culture do.
It’s interesting to think about how jargon can lead us to think we know less about what we’ve already mastered, and make us feel less than the experts we are.
I’ve talked about this before in the domain of sitting mastery. We were all master sitters by toddlerhood. If we grow up in rich enough soil, most of us can be multilingual. I can remember our daughters testing out sounds from all sorts of languages, trying to figure out what language they’ll be teaching themselves. They had the tonal rise and fall of Thai, the guttural consonants of German. And as my daughter refused another bite offered too soon, she was demonstrating that she was master of her entire biology. Zoe didn't have the language for any of this, and she didn't need it. Before her first birthday she already knew what had taken me decades of chair-sitting, lunch-inhaling, inbox-drowning to relearn. Her capacity was the measure of the pace, not my spoon.
We've been conditioned to read that kind of refusal as obstruction. She was the master of that meal, with the full authority of someone who hadn't yet been talked out of her wisdom. The sourdough starter doesn't apologize for taking overnight. The living soil doesn't accelerate its seasons for the futures market. The infant doesn't negotiate her hunger. These are essential players in a complex system working exactly as it should. And wealth hoarding is a sign that those of us in the 99 percent have been plenty productive, thank you very much. Time for a nap.
The WIP piling up at your feet isn't evidence of your inadequacy, it's a signal. The same signal Zoe sent me across the high chair tray on that warm spring morning. Someone upstream has forgotten who sets the pace around here.
She knew better than I, and so do you.