CONCEPT
Constraint Migration
The movement of the system bottleneck from one resource to another as the original constraint is elevated — the phenomenon that makes TOC a perpetual discipline rather than a one-time exercise.
Constraint Migration is the phenomenon that gives TOC's fifth Focusing Step its necessity: every successful improvement eventually moves the constraint. The factory whose bottleneck was a specific machine, once elevated, will find its bottleneck elsewhere — another machine, a quality process, the market itself. The knowledge organization whose constraint was coordination, once the constraint is shattered, finds a new constraint: judgment, or domain knowledge, or market absorption rate. The migration is a feature of constraint theory, not a bug, and organizations that do not track it end up managing a constraint that no longer binds while the actual constraint sits unmanaged.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The mechanics of constraint migration follow directly from Goldratt's framework. When the constraint is elevated (Step Four), its capacity expands. Other resources, previously subordinated to it, now become tight. Eventually one of them becomes the new constraint. Sometimes the migration is immediate and dramatic — as in the AI transition, where the coordination constraint was