Follow The Fish

Every consultant has a moment in their career when a simple experience permanently changes how they see operations.  No two operations are alike and no two approaches can be the same.  I came to this realization in a cold production facility on the Lower Mainland, watching fish fillets move down a line. I had been brought in to lead an improvement effort, another consultant had already completed an analysis. Their conclusion was straightforward: the biggest opportunity was that “people weren’t busy enough.” At the time, that seemed logical. If people look idle, something must be wrong.

Then I stepped onto the floor.

Within minutes, I realized I was about to make the same mistake—judging performance by how occupied the workers appeared. But as I watched the line, something clicked. The real story wasn’t in the people at all. It was in the product. The fish told the truth.

That moment was my first real introduction to the concept of flow. True continuous flow isn’t about keeping everyone in constant motion. It’s about keeping the product in motion. When flow exists, the product moves smoothly from one step to the next with minimal waiting, no batching, no hidden queues, and no choke points. When flow breaks down, the system compensates with chaos—people rushing, work piling up, quality slipping, and leaders wondering why everything feels harder than it should.

The only way to understand flow is to follow the product itself. You have to watch it, time it, and track its journey from start to finish. Where does it stop? How long does it wait? What interrupts its movement? Where does it surge forward only to crash into a bottleneck? Flow is never theoretical. It’s always observable, and it always tells the truth.

In that fish plant, once we shifted the analysis away from “Are people busy?” to “Is the product flowing?”, the real opportunities became obvious. There were long waits between trimming and portioning. Packaging was a clear bottleneck. Upstream overproduction was creating unnecessary inventory. Operators were compensating for poor flow with extra motion and rework. None of this was visible when we were watching the people. All of it became clear when we watched the fish.

That experience shaped how I approach every continuous-flow environment to this day. Whether it’s manufacturing, service delivery, or even a knowledge-work process, the principle holds: follow the work, not the workers. The product will always reveal the truth about the system.

And that’s why, whenever I walk into an organization that should have continuous flow, I still say the same thing—half joking, fully serious: “Let’s follow the fish.” People usually stare at me, confused. No one knows what I mean. And that’s exactly why it still makes me laugh.

Because behind the joke is a simple lesson that has guided me ever since: if you want to understand flow, don’t watch the people. Follow the product. Follow the value. Follow the fish.