Listeners to NPR were treated in recent weeks to not one but two versions (and a couple follow-up blog posts) of Planet Money’s adulatory veneration of a self-described “Gerber baby” look alike efficiency expert, Matt Leblanc.
Planet Money explains that Matt works for a “giant global logistics company” and “it actually turns out his process is really scientific.” You know, “he uses a stop watch and does all these calculations and he has this huge whiteboard where he’s drawing out boxes and arrows.”
Color me unconvinced. Some say slack, in fact, has some important benefits. One example, slack is a factor that fosters creativity.
But to Leblanc slack is, plain and simple, waste. And he can prove it. The first illustration of Matt’s work we get is the cycle-timing of a Starbucks barista. His hypothetical calculation concludes that if a barista spends only four hours of an eight hour day actually making lattes he’s only 50% efficient. For Matt these calculations make obvious sense. He sees a lot of slack out there. And that’s bad:
We actually call it waste. There are eight types of waste that we talk about. The acronym is Tim T. Wood. It’s transportation, inventory, motion, talent, waiting, over production, over processing and defects.
More weird science if you ask me. But what Matt is preaching we’ve heard many times before. Its modern manifestation date from the early twentieth century with the “scientific management” concepts of Frederick Winslow Taylor. Those concepts were most famously extended by Henry Ford in the first assembly line.
You can draw a straight line from Taylor’s time-and-motion studies to Matt Leblanc’s whiteboard boxes and arrows. While Taylor’s most strict and mechanical methods were rejected at the time, they have found new life in the networked computer age. With their return, Matt is in the comfortable mainstream when he says all slack is waste.
But is it, really?
In his 1997 book, Trapped In The Net: The Unintended Consequences of Computerization, Gene Rochlin argues that we need slack. This from his p.127 discussion of automation in the airline industry on:
[S]afety in the expertly operated systems we have studied depends not only on technical redundancy against possible equipment failures and human redundancy to guard against single-judgment errors, but also on that wonderfully scarce resource of slack — that sometimes small but always important excess margin of unconsumed resources and time through which an operator can buy a little breathing room to think about the decision that needs to be made, and in which the mental map can be adjusted and trimmed.
In many of the newer automated systems, however, such human requirements of slack, excess capacity, trial-and-error, and shift overlaps are often assumed to be wasteful, an inefficient resource to be engineered away. In the worst case, that can lead to a plant or process that has no extra resources and no backup, and can collapse much more quickly in the case of extensive failure.
And no time for the Starbucks barista to establish a rapport with the clientele paying four bucks for that venti latte we used to pay fifty cents for at the donut shop. On p.213 Rochlin observes:
Of particular concern is the degree to which what is destroyed or discarded in the relentless pursuit of technical and operational efficiency is not waste or slop , but “slack,” the human and material buffering capacity that allows organizational and social systems to absorb unpredicted, and often unpredictable, shocks.
The social costs in many of these cases may seem moderately but not critically serious. In the short term, that may be true. To those of us who study indirect and collective effects on human behavior and long-term trends in human interaction, however, the potential effects on the future structures, social formations, and organizations of human societies, the potential losses or social means for learning, social capacity for adaptation, and social space for innovation and creactivity that are pointed at, if not actually represented by such cases, are more than a little disturbing.
A few years back Business Week had a cover story on the struggle at 3M between efficiency and creativity. The piece begins with CEO James McNerney, the first outsider to lead the insular company in its 100-year history, leaving the company. McNerney was considered a great get when they hired him, and he implemented a series of management techniques designed to decrease production defects and increase efficiency.
The CEO that followed, George Buckley, dialed back on the efficiency initiatives. He concluded that while profitability and earnings had been made steady by those efficiency efforts, the future profitability of the company required innovative creative products. Efficiency processes, the lack of slack (company policy allowed employees to use 15% of their time to pursue independent projects, at Google it’s 20%), killed creativity. The new innovative products weren’t happening and those products were necessary to a profitable future.
I’m not down on Matt. He’s young and he’s learning:
You can’t just move people’s desks, you can’t just move people’s staplers, you have to bring them along, because if you don’t then you’ll get physically threatened.
Maybe one day even he will see the value of creativity. Hopefully that insight won’t require any physical threats.