Ops Word of the Month: Bandwidth
What bandwidth really means.
When I’m working with businesses and organizations, I hear the word “bandwidth” a lot. Sometimes it's “We don’t have the bandwidth right now” or “our team is at capacity—there’s no bandwidth left.” What people are naming is we’re stretched, we’re overloaded, or we can’t add one more thing without something breaking.
Bandwidth is about flow.
From a technical standpoint, the term “bandwidth” is used in telecommunications. Think about internet speed. Broadband means a wider channel–a bigger tube–through which information can flow. When the tube is wide enough, lots of data–things–can move through it at once. When the tube is narrow, things get congested and slow down. Signals lag. The flow gets clogged. Connections drop. For instance, I noticed that my video calls get slower around the time when school lets out. More people join the wifi all at once means more data / things in the system. It flows more slowly, or gets stuck, and my video stutters or the meeting drops entirely.
Things don’t move faster because they try harder. They move faster or better because the system has been built to sustain more flow.
For organizations and businesses, low bandwidth looks like:
Knowledge trapped in one or two people’s heads
Decisions bottlenecking at a single point/person
Work that needs constant re-clarification because it’s not laid out in a way that makes it easy to see and follow
High bandwidth often looks like:
Clear roles, functions and activities that are named and written down somewhere for everyone to access; SOP’s for how to deliver the work, also written down or visualized
Clear approaches to making decisions and clear understanding of who makes which decisions
A clear infographic that does a lot of explaining in a clear, short and easily-digetable way–a one-page annual cycle or Gannt chart that anyone can understand is the goal.
Bandwidth can be increased.
Work on the infrastructure and create a wider tube–install new tech or tools that can handle more. And/or modify the flow. Send less through or send it through in a way that avoids clogs. When organizations try to increase bandwidth by pushing harder, the tube stays the same size–and the pressure builds. Burnout and dropped balls happen–just like choppy videos, these are predictable outcomes.
When the channel widens, work flows more smoothly, teams regain breathing room, and progress becomes steady.
This was first released in E.TBD’s monthly Ops Update newsletter. You can read it here and subscribe here.