For 2026: Identify Your Constraints and Fix What’s Quietly Holding You Back

This time of year has a familiar rhythm. Goals are getting drafted. Numbers are being discussed. New initiatives are floated and tested for fit. And the same quiet assumption often sneaks in: if we just do a little more… we’ll get a little further.

That’s why a recent conversation on the My First Million podcast caught my attention. Sam Parr and Shaan Puri sat down with Ryan Deiss, founder of DigitalMarketer and Scalable. Ryan offered a simple, practical way of thinking about operations, ownership, and constraints that pairs naturally with EOS-style leadership and long-term strategic planning.

As you head into 2026, these three lenses are worth sitting with for a moment as a team. Be sure not to miss the third insight on identifying your constraints… it’s the bow that ties everything together and has the potential to open new doors in the year ahead.

Visual Mapping: Take Time to See the Business You’re Actually Running

Ryan describes business in refreshingly simple terms: you make something, you sell something, and you fulfill something. Everything else is detail layered on top of those three movements.

The challenge is that most organizations can’t clearly see how those movements actually happen. The process is “known,” but rarely mapped.

The solution? Visually map one core product or service, not as you wish it worked, but as it truly works today. Start at the beginning and walk the process forward step by step through each touchpoint. After each step, ask “then what?” and follow the trail until you reach the end of the experience.

This kind of mapping often exposes invisible friction that leadership teams feel but can’t quite name. We’ll come back to that in a moment when we discuss identifying constraints and leaks in your processes. For EOS organizations, this work naturally aligns with documenting core processes, clarifying accountability, and tightening the operating system with the added benefit of revealing what is really happening rather than what is merely assumed.

Who Owns What? Clarity Lightens the Load

Once the map exists, the next question becomes unavoidable: who owns each step? Not who participates, who helps, or who answers the email if someone is out of the office… but who is clearly accountable when something breaks, stalls, or underperforms?

Many leadership teams discover that ownership is either duplicated or missing entirely. Accountability fades. Multiple people assume someone else has it covered, or a responsibility slowly drifts into the gray space between departments. Over time, this creates drag: long response times, quiet frustration, internal confusion, and systems that might technically work but never quite improve.

This is where EOS principles like the Accountability Chart come alive in practical ways. Clear ownership removes friction, restores momentum, and gives growth room to breathe again. When people know what they truly own, problems get solved faster, communication gets cleaner, and the weight of running the business starts to feel lighter.

Constraint Identification: Finding the Real Lever

Earlier, we talked about how visual mapping helps you see handoffs that slow things down, gaps where clarity fades, and places where the customer experience quietly degrades. That’s where the next insight from Ryan comes into play. Nearly every business problem can be traced back to either a demand constraint or a supply constraint. You either don’t have enough demand coming in, or you don’t have the capacity, systems, or consistency to fulfill what you already have.

Most organizations spend an enormous amount of energy generating ideas: new offers, new campaigns, new tools, new initiatives. Ideas feel productive, but they often bypass a more important question: where is our system currently limited?

Constraint identification asks you to look for the leak in the bucket.

• Where are customers waiting?
• Where are leads falling off?
• Where is your team stretched thin?
• Where is quality slipping, follow-through fading, or rework quietly becoming normal?

That point of tension is your true growth lever. Until it’s addressed, every new idea simply pushes more pressure into the same bottleneck. EOS tools like Rocks, Scorecards, and Issues Lists already give teams a structure for improvement, but being intentional about identifying constraints helps prioritize what truly matters. Not all issues deserve equal energy. Fix the constraints holding back the system, and the rest of the business begins to move more freely.

The Real Work of Preparing for 2026

Do the work. Map the business you are actually running. Clarify who truly owns each step. Identify the constraint that is quietly shaping your results. Then decide what deserves your energy.

Sustainable growth is rarely about chasing what’s new. It’s about removing what’s in the way and building on a foundation that’s finally clear, aligned, and ready to carry what comes next.