Slack: The Missing Ingredient Required For Culture Change and Innovation
Whether it’s individual change or organizational change, everyone agrees that change is hard. It takes time, energy and experimentation to learn fast. It’s much more difficult however if busyness is the modus operandi. When we are constantly busy, there’s no time to learn or think about what we are doing and what could be better. There’s no time to experiment with new ideas or try new approaches that could help us improve.
While there are many ingredients to nurture change, one of the missing ones I have seen throughout my work with organizations is the absence of slack.
Tom Demarco in his book Slack asserts that Slack is a prescription for building a capacity to change into the modern enterprise. He offers a metaphor with an 8-tiles puzzle and the open space required to move the tiles to get them in order and while that exercise is nontrivial, imagine if the open space is eliminated with the “new and improved” 9-tiles puzzle. Demarco says that the open space represents what he calls slack, the degree of freedom required to effect change.
On Busyness
Extreme busyness is injurious to the real work of the organization. — Tom Demarco
Demarco writes that, “Very successful companies have never struck me as particularly busy; in fact, they are, as a group, rather laid-back. Energy is evident in the workplace, but it’s not the energy tinged with fear that comes from being slightly behind on everything.”
He continues to say, “The companies I have come to admire most show little obvious sense of hurry. They are more like an extended family, embarked on a project whose goal in only partly expressed in getting something done; the other part of the goal is that all involved learn and grow and enjoy themselves along the way.”
Demarco also explains the cost of task-switching or what he calls the penalty of task-switching. This comes from the idea that everything is a priority so we need to switch constantly between multiple tasks. The result is too many open tasks and nothing is done. We all know that “when everything is a priority, nothing is a priority”.
Demarco says that the penalty of task-switching is the sum of the mechanics of moving to a new task, rework due to inappropriate abort, immersion time for think-intensive tasks, frustration (emotional immersion) and the loss of team biding effect.
The Hurry Up Mantra
Demarco shows how what he calls the Hurry Up mantra and increased focus on busyness can end up causing people to slow down.
When employees or teams take notice of the pervasive mantra of Hurry Up, Hurry Up, they usually interpret it to mean stay busy. The culture also reinforces this by rewarding heroic behavior which usually alienates the rest of the team and hurts teamwork.
Demarco mentions other ingredients to culture change and innovation. One ingredient that he also emphasizes is the idea of Fear and Safety. He notes that, “The single must-be-present ingredient of successful organizational change is safety.”
Slack is a short read that provides much wisdom that continues to be relevant. The main idea of Demarco’s assertion is that Slack is the way you invest in change. Slack represents operational capacity sacrificed in the interests of long-term health.
More reading
Peopleware Productive Projects and Teams by Tom Demarco and Timothy Lister
