22/09/2026
A Nobel prize talking about bottlenecks and sifting information out of an ocean of data:
In his book “The Sciences of the Artificial” (1969), Herbert Simon shares an example of bottleneck identification and how to take them into consideration when designing a system. 👇
Printing capacity was a bottleneck: The State Department had to cope with overloaded teletypes and incoming communication lines --> the capacity was increased thanks to line printers --> but the new bottleneck was the capacity of officers to analyze the information --> the real bottleneck was management attention.
This example puts forward the real question: how to filter information and provide decision-makers with relevant information instead of just increasing the flow of data.
“A second example illustrates the importance, in choosing a representation for a design problem, of identifying correctly the limiting resource or resources. A few years ago, the State Department was troubled by the congestion that affected its incoming communication lines whenever there was a crisis abroad. The teletypes, unable to output messages as rapidly as they were received, would fall many hours behind. Important messages to Washington were seriously delayed in transmission. Since printing capacity was identified as the limiting factor, it was proposed to remedy the situation by substituting line printers for the teletypes, thereby increasing output by several orders of magnitude. No one asked about the next link in the chain: the capacity of officers at the country desks to process the messages that would come off the line printers. A deeper analysis would have shown that the real bottleneck in the process was the time and attention of the human decision makers who had to use the incoming information. Identification of the bottleneck would have generated in turn a more sophisticated design problem: How can incoming messages during a crisis be filtered in such a way that important information will have priority and will come to the attention of the decision makers, while unimportant information will be shunted aside until the crisis is past? Stated in this way, the design problem is not an easy one, but if a solution is found, even a partial one, it will at least tend to alleviate the real problem instead of aggravating it.”
This paragraph strongly resonates with Goldratt’s book “The Haystack Syndrome”.
