A long time ago, I read Tom DeMarco's book _Slack_. The details have all faded now, but very broadly he comments on the *necessity* of slack for an organization to respond flexibly to change.
“Slack” was formative in my leadership journey for many reasons, not the least of which was that it was given to me by an employee during an intervention with the demand, “You need to read this.” 🫠 One of the (many) key lessons for me was “People under pressure cannot think any faster.” That cemented my understanding of my function (as an engineering leader) to BE ablative insulation for my teams collectively and my people individually. 🔥
I've never been a manager, but I've watched organizations move farther and farther away from the point DeMarco was making. If "People under pressure can't think faster" is a quote from DeMarco, I've long since forgotten it, but I fully agree in either case; and I've had the opportunity to be "ablative insulation" (great phrase) as a senior technical person quite a few different times.
This is great. A strong reference is the book Scarcity by Mullainathan and Shafir which I think you'll find is a fun read. A strong analogy from the book is packing for a trip: with a small or a large suitcase. With a small suitcase (no slack), you must trade-off items and consider multipurpose uses of each item. With a large suitcase, you have slack to pack extras and handle alternative situations.
"The first strategy for managing dependencies is always Dependency Breaking." This.
I lost count on how many times "The hamburger method by Gojko Adzic" helped with that and ended up creating some slack as a bonus generated by developing simpler solutions.
A long time ago, I read Tom DeMarco's book _Slack_. The details have all faded now, but very broadly he comments on the *necessity* of slack for an organization to respond flexibly to change.
“Slack” was formative in my leadership journey for many reasons, not the least of which was that it was given to me by an employee during an intervention with the demand, “You need to read this.” 🫠 One of the (many) key lessons for me was “People under pressure cannot think any faster.” That cemented my understanding of my function (as an engineering leader) to BE ablative insulation for my teams collectively and my people individually. 🔥
I've never been a manager, but I've watched organizations move farther and farther away from the point DeMarco was making. If "People under pressure can't think faster" is a quote from DeMarco, I've long since forgotten it, but I fully agree in either case; and I've had the opportunity to be "ablative insulation" (great phrase) as a senior technical person quite a few different times.
This is great. A strong reference is the book Scarcity by Mullainathan and Shafir which I think you'll find is a fun read. A strong analogy from the book is packing for a trip: with a small or a large suitcase. With a small suitcase (no slack), you must trade-off items and consider multipurpose uses of each item. With a large suitcase, you have slack to pack extras and handle alternative situations.
"The first strategy for managing dependencies is always Dependency Breaking." This.
I lost count on how many times "The hamburger method by Gojko Adzic" helped with that and ended up creating some slack as a bonus generated by developing simpler solutions.