Slack

Highlights

• An organization that can accelerate but not change direction is like a car that can speed up but not steer.
• Slack at all levels is necessary to make the organization work effectively and to grow. It is the lubricant of change.
• The premise here is that the hierarchy lines on the chart are also the only communication conduit. Information can flow only along the lines. But this is a disaster. The hierarchy lines are paths of authority. They are far too narrowband for all the information that needs to be communicated. Communication in healthy companies takes place in the white space.
• Change is not an ad hoc business—organizational death is right around the corner if change happens only when the change specialists get around to it. Ability to change has to be an organic part of the organization. Change has to be going on all the time, everywhere. It needs to be everybody’s business.
• Slack is the way you invest in change. Slack represents operational capacity sacrificed in the interests of long-term health.
• A penny saved from any kind of investment is never a penny earned.
• When you’re torn between two mutually exclusive goals, when there is no room for give in either one, the result is stress.
• “People under time pressure don’t think faster.”
• There is such a thing as a bad schedule. A bad schedule is one that sets a date that is subsequently missed. That’s it. That’s the beginning and the end of how a schedule should be judged.
• The missed schedule indicts the planners, not the workers. Even if the workers are utterly incompetent, a plan that takes careful note of their inadequacies can help to minimize the damage. A plan that takes no account of realities is not just useless but dangerous.
• When the schedule is wrong, the work goes on anyway, proceeding in some way other than as planned. The result is that the effort is necessarily hurt.
• Angry managers are losers, hapless incompetents who are in way over their heads and haven’t got the faintest idea how to lead.
• Litigation can be an effective way to deflect blame. A failure that cannot be blamed on someone outside the organization must be accepted within the organization. And some highly political organizations exact a very high price for that.
• Healthy companies know that they have to allow people to fail without assessing blame. They have to do that or else no one will take on anything that’s not a sure bet.
• Authority here has more force than reality … for a while. Eventually, reality weighs in, and the result is another fine mess.
• If you are determined to avoid litigation, then you need to negotiate with an entirely different strategy. The strategy I would urge upon you is what the author Verna Allee calls the principle of fair exchange.1 Simply stated, this principle requires you to arrive at an agreement that would be equally acceptable to you from either side.
• You can’t empower anyone without taking chances. The power you’ve granted is the power to err. If that person messes up, you take the consequences.
• Looked at from the opposite perspective, it is this capacity to injure the person above you that makes empowerment work. It leaves the empowered person thinking, “Oh my God, if I fail at this, my boss is going to look like a chump for trusting me.”
• As defense against failure, standard process is a kind of armor. The more worried you are about failure, the heavier the armor you put on. But armor always has a side effect of reduced mobility.
• An efficient but not effective organization, on the other hand, is moving in the wrong direction. The more it optimizes, the more progress it makes away from its real goals.
• Directing an entire organization is hard. Seeming to direct it, on the other hand, is easy. All you have to do is note which way the drift is moving and instruct the organization to go that way.
• The more optimized an organism (organization) is, the more likely that the slack necessary to help it become more effective has been eliminated.
• MBO depends on status quo. It assures merely incremental change. It guides you to make tactical adjustments only, always under the limitation that you mustn’t muck with the present strategy, whatever it may be. This is a sure path toward extinction.
• MBO, Deming writes, provides artificial, extrinsic motivators—the objectives—which drive out workers’ intrinsic motivators.
• When the statement walks perfectly between what is and what could be, and the could-be part is wonderful but not impossible, acceptance by those listening is almost assured.
• Lack of power is a great excuse for failure, but sufficient power is never a necessary condition of leadership. There is never sufficient power. In fact, it is success in the absence of sufficient power that defines leadership.
• Always give trust slightly in advance of demonstrated trustworthiness.
• Each time you give trust in advance of demonstrated performance, you flirt with danger. If you’re risk-averse, you won’t do it. And that’s a shame, because the most effective way to gain the trust and loyalty of those beneath you is to give the same in equal measure.
• The fact that managers have time on their hands (i.e., their operations tasks use up less than eight hours per day) gives them time for reinvention.
• Reinvention takes place in the middle of the organization, so the first requisite is that there has to be a middle. I’ll assume your organization still has one. Now pour in some slack, increase safety, and take steps to break down managerial isolation. Voilà, the formula for middle-of-the-hierarchy reinvention.
• The white space between peer middle managers is where reinvention happens. If the white space is not conducive of communication and joint responsibility, reinvention doesn’t happen at all.
• There is no such thing as “healthy” competition within a knowledge organization; all internal competition is destructive.
• We all take guidance from the managers above us as to where to direct our competitive energies; if that management steers us to compete directly with our peers, it can hardly complain that we’ve acted unprofessionally in doing so.
• The offense component of internal competition is problematic, but the defense component is always injurious. When peer managers play defense against each other (try to stop each other from scoring), they are engaging in anticooperation.
• Learning and reinvention take time. If people are too busy doing the work, they will never have the time to learn new ways to approach it.
• When a full-fledged change is in progress, it’s almost impossible to tell the difference between someone who’s diligently trying and failing (normal mode during change) and someone who is rejecting the change.
• Great change managers have got a lot of markers to call in. They have built a reservoir of trust and they tap into it to entice their people to embrace change.
• The control that risk management gives you is stochastic, not deterministic.
• Projects, like most human endeavors, are characterized by long trail-off toward the right, so that the peak of the curve is squeezed left; the area to the left of the peak is barely a third of the total:
• The paradox here is that organizations can’t be aggressive about risk-taking without some meaningful assessment of the extent of the uncertainties. Without sensible risk management, organizations are prone to become stubbornly risk-averse.
• The difference between the time it takes you to arrive at “all prudent speed ” and time it would take you at “breakneck speed” is your slack. Slack is what helps you arrive quickly but with an unbroken neck.
• The earliest date by which the work could conceivably be done makes an excellent goal but an awful schedule.