Reading books is one of my favorite stress-busters. I feel like I can escape the world for a while when I read a book. And so a lot of what I write is motivated by my learnings from various books. Some of us are familiar with slack, the messaging tool. But the word slack I am referring to here is not that. There are many meanings of the word but essentially it means not held tightly.

I had the opportunity to read this book called Slack by Tom DeMarco a while back and I found it eye opening. The more interesting part of the book was that it was written in 2002, almost 20 years ago and yet everything it said rang beautifully true, especially in the pandemic world.

Modern work and focus on efficiency

The book focuses on the modern work ethic, the modern workplace and its focus on efficiency. One of the goals of a lot of workplaces is to reduce costs, make things more efficient and in the process, remove any slack in the system. For example, if you need an assistant who may only have work 50% of the time, the modern workplace’s tendency is to remove the assistant and hire a temp for that 50% of the time, thus saving costs.

At the high level, it sounds good. Reduce costs, earn more profits, reinvest into innovation or return to shareholders. But there are hidden costs with this desire to cut slack out of the system.

Slack, and the lack of it

At a very high level, the lack of slack can cause cascading failures. Imagine a machine A takes 20s generally to process some work and that output is consumed by other systems. Imagine that all of this is running efficiently with no wastage anywhere. Let’s say now that A suffers a minor failure for 5 minutes. For that 5 minutes, the system dependent on A is down and now due to lack of additional capacity everything is delayed by 5 minutes all across the system.

Or in the above assistant scenario, if one day there was need for additional work from assistant but they are only available for half a day, the entire organization depending on that assistant’s work can be delayed or brought to a halt.

In workplaces, slack manifests in the form of everyone being fully busy or even more. There is no time left for people to just take a long coffee break or have a water cooler conversation. Empty calendars are frowned upon or seen as a sign of slacking off at such workplace. You might be constantly threatened to be busy or pretend to be so that your boss or your company doesn’t feel your work is irrelevant.

Prevents agility

So in a workplace where there is no to little slack, things may work fine for a while. In fact, it may appear that everything is going great. You are getting the most out of all resources. But now suddenly, if a new priority appears due to changing world. You are faced with a difficult option: delay existing work or ignore the new priority. More often we end up spending more time trying to consider the new priority and minimizing the delay to existing work. This leads to burnout and can only be done for so many new priorities.

But in the current world, things are changing daily. You cannot keep up if there is no slack built into your work. You may not have time to think and thus cannot make agile decisions or pivot fast. Also because the system is focused on not having slack, your delay to existing work leads to delay of someone else’s work (dependent on you) and so on until it becomes a cascading failures across the company.

Poor decisions

The above scenario often also leads to poor decision making. When you are trying to keep up with your current work and trying to rush into understanding new things, inevitably you end up making poor decisions. This leads to more changes, more work and thus pressures you into even further chaos and further poor decision making.

In today’s world, this leads to continued stress or employees quitting. Small failures in one part of the company can thus cause ripple effects across the entire organization.

The downside

Even if a company was to allow slack, and let people keep open time to think or deal with sudden shifts in the world, it might sometimes come with a downside. The downside is that it can be abused by some people to maybe not do anything at work, or do less than what is expected of them. However, this then boils down to a question of trust. Do you put trust in your employees by default that they can manage their own time and have slack built in, or do you not trust and try to ensure that they are working to their full efficiency. I personally would prefer to trust by default and take the risks of some people taking advantage of this then the other option.

What can be done?

There are many different ways to address the lack of slack in organizations. Here are a couple of ideas:

I think for individual contributors (especially in knowledge work), this means keep aside maybe one day a week for unplanned work. For good weeks, this will be like an extra day off or very limited work. In bad weeks, this might be the buffer that helps you tide over and get back to good weeks.

For leaders, this means not filling up your calendar with meetings. This also requires to have sufficient leadership bandwidth at various levels that can absorb the priority shifts and keep teams on track. Having that middle-management layer is worth it, in the long run.