One station in our Lean simulation was taking 41 seconds. The target was 50 seconds per car. It was the slowest station — the bottleneck. Everyone downstream was waiting. Upstream was stacking up.

The Split That Shocked the Room

The team split Station 3 into two roles: 3A and 3B. Two people. Each doing half the work.

Expected result: two 20-second tasks. Actual result: 13 seconds each.

The room couldn't believe it. You'd think splitting a 41-second task would give you two 20-second tasks. But it dropped to 13. Why?

Because when one person has too much, they're also dealing with confusion, context-switching, and pressure. Remove that cognitive overhead, and the actual work is faster than you'd expect.

Evening the Load in Construction

This principle — "evening the load" — applies directly to construction:

• Who's the bottleneck? The person everyone's waiting on?
• What if you split their role? Not hired someone new — just redistributed?
• What if the estimator shared the load with a pre-construction coordinator?
• What if the site supervisor stopped being material handler AND quality checker AND scheduler?