Bottleneck
A point where work is restricted or delayed because capacity or flow is lower than the demand arriving there.
Plain-English glossary
Words should help you.
They should make things clearer.
These are the meanings we use on this site. They are deliberately practical, not academic.
If a term could reasonably mean different things to different people, we define what we mean here. Linked terms across the site use a dotted underline and open the matching definition.
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Capability
The skill, knowledge, tools and conditions needed to perform a type of work effectively.
Capacity
The amount of useful work a person, team or system can realistically handle within a period.
Constraint
The factor that currently limits the outcome or flow of the wider system.
Control
A check or safeguard designed to reduce error, risk or unwanted variation.
Decision rights
Who has authority to make a particular decision, who must be consulted, and when that decision is final.
Demand governance
The rules for what work enters the system, who can request it, how it is prioritised, and who can override that order.
Dependency
Something a task, team or system relies on before it can proceed or work correctly.
Diagnostic
A structured investigation used to understand what is happening and what may be causing it before choosing a response.
Escalation
Moving a problem or decision to someone with greater authority because it cannot be resolved where it sits.
Evidence
Information that can support, weaken or disprove an explanation. Evidence is stronger when it can be independently checked.
Exception
A case that is allowed to bypass the usual rule, process or standard.
Feedback loop
A cycle where the result of an action is fed back into future decisions or behaviour.
Flow
How smoothly work moves through a system from start to finish, including where it waits, loops or gets interrupted.
Handoff
The point where work, information or responsibility moves from one person, team or system to another.
Hypothesis
A possible explanation that must be tested against evidence before it is treated as true.
Incentive
A reward, pressure or consequence that makes one behaviour more rational or attractive than another.
Intervention
A deliberate change made to try to alter an outcome.
Lens
A perspective used to examine one part of a problem without assuming that part is the cause.
Mechanism
The process or behaviour that could be producing the result you can see.
Metric
A measure used to track performance, activity or an outcome. A metric is only useful if it represents the thing you actually care about.
Operating model
How an organisation actually gets work done: roles, decisions, workflows, information, incentives and routines.
Outcome
The result that matters after the work is done, rather than the activity used to get there.
Pattern
A repeated shape in events, behaviour or evidence. A pattern is a clue, not proof of a cause.
Process
A repeatable set of activities used to produce an outcome.
Queue
Work that is waiting for attention, a decision, information or capacity before it can continue.
Rework
Work that has to be repeated, corrected or rebuilt because the first pass did not produce a usable result.
Root cause
The underlying condition or combination of conditions that produces a recurring problem.
Sample
A subset of people, cases, events or data examined to learn about a wider situation.
Signal
An observation that may indicate a meaningful change or pattern. A signal is something to investigate, not proof by itself.
Symptom
The visible or experienced problem. The symptom may be real even when its cause sits somewhere else.
System
A set of connected people, processes, tools, decisions and incentives whose interactions produce an overall result.
System-level
Looking at the behaviour of the whole connected system rather than one team or component in isolation.
Trade-off
A choice where improving one thing may require giving up or accepting less of something else.
Triangulation
Checking the same question against multiple independent sources or types of evidence.
Workflow
The real sequence of steps through which work moves from request to completion.
Workaround
An informal way of getting work done when the intended process or system does not work well enough.
Work in progress
Work that has started but is not yet finished. Too much at once can create queues, switching and delay.
No match yet.
If a word on the site feels unclear and it is missing here, tell us. The glossary should grow with the language people actually need explained.