In his book, Slack, Tom DeMarco contends that the world of work promotes busyness at the expense of creativity and innovation. Our culture of lean organizations and individual busyness means that no one has room in their day to do new things. Everyone is busy simply 'doing.' Often, there is no time for thinking, even though we get requests to 'analyze this' or offer recommendations on that. When these are not new things, but things we can do in our sleep it's not a problem, it can simply be woven into the general busyness, but when they are new innovative things which require real analysis and thought, many of us simply don't have enough connected un-busy time to engage with the material. It is stressful for the people caught up in busyness and it harms organizations which can't respond to change, can't find the best solutions, and can't realize the potential of the staff currently in the organization.
We're often eager to bring in outsiders for new positions or for promotions. The outsiders will bring energy and new ideas. We recognize that they have different views and experiences and that those different views and experiences can be very valuable to the organization. What we generally overlook is the second reason they bring energy and new ideas--anyone starting a new job in a new organization has slack for the first six months to a year. They have 'free' time to do new things. After that, they're as busy being busy as anyone else. If an organization isn't willing to recognize the benefits of slack for its workers, the only solution is to keep bringing in new people every time the 'old' batch of new people reach the point of no-slack.
From the Introduction:
We live in an age of acceleration. Whatever the formula was for business success a few years ago, it won't work today. Today there needs to be more and more work crammed into less and less time. There are 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. The average manager or knowledge worker is so busy today that there is simply not a spare moment for anything. There isn't time to plan, only to do. There is no time for analysis, invention, training, strategic thinking, contemplation, or lunch.
...
Suppose that where the corporation is going now has to be changed. The needed change is not just to do the same thing still faster but to switch directions and do something else entirely. Change is always complicated and challenging, but in the superaccelerated corporation, change of direction is 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.
Among the things that happen in the culture of busyness is that responsiveness and efficiency actually suffer. Staff are encouraged to pick early due dates for projects even though they know and their managers know that those dates are impossible. Busyness without analysis can lead organizations to go rapidly in the wrong direction without any way to stop being busy and initiate some course corrections.
Regarding overcommitment and 'aggressive' schedules:
In the most highly stressed projects, people at all levels talk about the schedule being "Aggressive" or even "highly aggressive." In my experience, projects in which the schedule is commonly termed aggressive or highly aggressive invariably turn out to be fiascoes. "Aggressive schedule," I've come to suspect, is a kind of code phrase--understood implicitly by all involved--for a schedule that is absurd, that has no chance at all of being met.
DeMarco proposes a number of things that organizations can do to encourage slack, creativity and innovation. Among these:
Staring your boss in the face and saying June 1 when you know that even a year from June would be optimistic sounds bad. It sounds like lying. But being a Can Do manager sounds good. We're all expected to have a certain Can Do attitude. Admit it: You feel a little thrill of approval when the big boss calls for extraordinary performance and his/her subordinates respond, "Can do." ....
Can Do is, unfortunately, antithetical to risk management. Risk management has to acknowledge directly the Can't Do possibilities. There is no way to be a complete Can Do manager and also practice risk management.
Honest risk management, DeMarco says, requires that we put slack back in the system because it is the only way we can complete projects efficiently and effective, though probably not at the 'breakneck' speeds that many workers and managers are pressured to promise.
Slack expresses succinctly what many of us know--that we are busier than ever. Many of us also know that we are frustrated because in all our vast busyness (which is not necessarily 'busy work' but is often actually be 'getting things done') we are not doing the work we love--the creative, innovative work--there isn't time for that. And most of us can't figure out why; we hope, in fact, that if we just work a little bit harder it will all come together. Creative and innovative work, unfortunately for us, requires more than that. It requires, as DeMarco tells us, Slack.
Things to talk about when talking about things by Steve Whittaker:
...reviews the existing research literature concerning support for talking about objects in mediated communication, drawing three conclusions (a) speech alone is often sufficient for effective conversations; (b) visual information about work objects is generally more valuable than visual information about work participants' (c) disjoing visual perspectives can undermine communication processes.
I read this paper awhile ago and have had a paper copy sitting on my desk for, like, a year because I want to refer back to it occasionally and paper has been serving the social function of placeholding for me. In an effort to take advantage of the 'outboard brain' aspect of this weblog, I've created a new category called 'Things I've read' (which I'd like to be able to find again) and I'm going to stick longer papers and reports that I have either already blogged or will be blogging as I go that I'd like to refer back to later. We'll see how it goes...