I like the framing of organizational slack as immune system, instead of fat, and I emphatically agree with the author.
> ...“slack”: unbooked time that isn’t already spoken for. It’s always the first casualty, because it’s treated as a nicety... because it looks like waste...
> But that’s not what slack is. Slack is the only reason anything that comes up ever gets acted on. It’s what lets people take that signal that something is wrong, figure out why it’s happening, and then solve it... Without slack, the signal still arrives, everybody’s just too busy to pick up the phone or listen to the backlog of voicemails.
> [The AI playbook] gets this infuriatingly backwards: it treats slack as the thing AI lets you eliminate. If the tools make us faster, why do we still need buffer time?
> Getting rid of it at the time you’re flooding the system with machine-generated code you don’t fully understand removes the mechanism to absorb something we know will happen: it will surprise you.
> You didn’t cut fat. It was never fat. You cut your organization’s immune system.
> ...“slack”: unbooked time that isn’t already spoken for. It’s always the first casualty, because it’s treated as a nicety... because it looks like waste...
> But that’s not what slack is. Slack is the only reason anything that comes up ever gets acted on. It’s what lets people take that signal that something is wrong, figure out why it’s happening, and then solve it... Without slack, the signal still arrives, everybody’s just too busy to pick up the phone or listen to the backlog of voicemails.
> [The AI playbook] gets this infuriatingly backwards: it treats slack as the thing AI lets you eliminate. If the tools make us faster, why do we still need buffer time?
> Getting rid of it at the time you’re flooding the system with machine-generated code you don’t fully understand removes the mechanism to absorb something we know will happen: it will surprise you.
> You didn’t cut fat. It was never fat. You cut your organization’s immune system.