While systems happen all at once, the truth is that our ability to act on systems to change their behavior is still somewhat limited, which means we need to pick the inputs to act on carefully.
In most cases, the input to act on should be the most limiting input in the system, i.e., the one that is acting as the bottleneck for everything else. Once we’ve improved that input, we can move on to the next one.
With that said, we should still be wary of and account for the cascading effects we are triggering by affecting that input.
This manifests in strategic thinking when you consider that strategy requires focus.