Slack

Tom de Marco’s Slack is a great example of why we should go back to the classics, rather than chase the hotness of the thousand new business books released every month.

It’s short and powerful, and hits you with the core message early and often. Efficient organisations are brittle. They cannot react to changing conditions, and things often take longer to achieve end-to-end.

Instead, we should strive to be effective by ensuring there is Slack in the system.

We recognise that people are not fungible units of resource. It takes time to change contexts, to build expertise and to get good at a job. Splitting someone’s focus to two tasks comes with an effectiveness cost. Splitting them to several means they may as well not be there. The orchestration costs more than the benefit they bring.

Sometime you need people to not be 100% busy, so they can do the important thing when it turns up. The value is in being able to absorb the change, and to be effective you need to accept the ‘cost’ of them not ‘producing’ all the time.

More pressure slows people down, knowledge work requires space to think, experiment and think again. You don’t get better long term outcomes by forcing more onto people, you get better outcomes by them having space to breathe.

Tom takes us through thoughts on how to scale this thinking to the organisation, on the right time to drive change (before things go bad), and why the connecting layer of leadership is key to giving you this successful org.

Watch out for the push to efficiency if you want to be effective!