We live in an age of acceleration. The formula for business success a few years ago won't work today. More work needs to be crammed into less time, with fewer people doing more and doing it faster in less space with less support, and with tighter tolerances and higher quality requirements than ever before. People are so busy they don't have a spare moment for anything. No time to plan, only to do. No time for analysis, invention, training, strategic thinking, contemplation or lunch.

Enter the need for change Slack: the essential ingredient for change Benefits of slack Where on earth do I find the time?

The ubiquitous "hurry up" mantra of business today has undoubtedly helped corporations speed up. They do what they do faster and more inexpensively than before. But there is a downside.

Enter the need for change

Suppose that what the corporation is doing now has to be changed. What's needed is not just to do the same things still faster, but to switch direction and do something else entirely. Change is always complicated and challenging, but in the superaccelerated corporation, change of direction is almost impossible. The very improvements that the hurry-up organization has made to go faster and cheaper have undermined its capacity to make any other kind of change. An organization that can accelerate but not change direction is like a car that can speed up but not steer. In the short run, it makes lots of progress in the direction it happens to be going. In the long run, it's just another road wreck.

Advertisement:

The more efficient you are, the harder it is to change. Change takes time, something busy people don't have. Extreme busyness also gives people the perfect excuse for not embracing change: Sorry, we're too busy doing real work. And even worse, the organizational steps that raised efficiency (mostly downsizings and layoffs) have made people tense about looking imperfect; of course, no meaningful change can happen without people looking ‹ at least temporarily ‹ inexpert and possibly even clownish.

Slack: The essential ingredient for change

Managers often complain of two main problems: 1) their organizations are so busy that no one has time for anything, and 2) their organizations are change-phobic. They are so close to the problem they miss what should be obvious: The second of these problems is a direct result of the first.

Before you can even think about making change happen, take one key step to make change possible at all: Reintroduce a little slack into the work environment. Slack is a degree of freedom in your people's time and budget, and in their control of key choices about how work is to proceed. Slack is the essential ingredient for change in any knowledge work organization. Instead of the directed obsession with elimination of all slack (that's what we've been seeing during the past few years in the interests of efficiency), it's now time to ease up and give people enough slack to be able to change. In this era of sea change, the ability to turn on a dime is worth a lot more than that last little bit of efficiency.

The immediate effect of even modestly increased slack is palpable stress reduction. As long as you're hung up on operational efficiency, reduced stress makes no sense. After all, stressed people are trying harder, staying later and racing around more. All this frenzied activity can be reassuring to the managers who are themselves under a lot of stress. But stress can damage people's personal lives, and it does no less damage at work. Stress makes people distrustful and therefore not inclined to pitch in and help change happen. It ruins their judgment, and it messes up their relationships with peer workers, the very relationships that are necessary to provide support during the change process. Stress also makes everyone risk-averse and terrified of change.

Benefits of slack Reintroduction of an essential bit of slack is my best recipe for: • Reduced organizational stress. • Increased agility. • Better retention of key personnel (your “human capital”). • An improved capacity to invent and to invest in the future. • Acceptance of sensible risk-taking instead of risk-avoidance.

Slack gives people time for change. Just as important, it transfers some control from the organization to the individual, because the individual in some sense manages the newly acquired slack. You might worry that giving up even a bit of control might jeopardize the change; change is hard, so don't people have to be controlled into accepting it? If you have a teen-ager, you know the fallacy of that thinking. Top management can't dictate change from above, any more than parents can treat the raising of teen-agers as a pure exercise in authority. Workers at all levels need to embrace change and take part in managing it. This is particularly true of truly transformative change, the kind that reinvents the organization.

Slack is the little investment you make in your people so they can accept the challenge of change and feel they're being set up to succeed.

Where on earth do I find the time?

Create slack time in one of two ways: 1) increase prioritization discipline to make less essential work go away, and 2) invest. The first is hard but possible (you know there are tasks in your organization whose importance is artificially inflated to serve someone's power agenda). And the second may take some help from the top of the hierarchy, from the very people who know that change justifies investment. Investing $0 in your change capacity assures that you will always get your money's worth.

DeMarco can be reached at tdemarco@systemsguild.com.

Management Strategies newsletter

Get tips and advice on improving your management, communication and leadership skills

Network World's Career Advisor newsletter
News, tips and advice that help you make the most of your skills.

Apply for your free subscription to Network World. Click here. Or get Network World delivered in PDF each week.

Request a reprint or permission to use this article.