Issue 01, Autumn 2026

Notes/Issue 01

On slack

A reading note on Tom DeMarco's argument that idle capacity is a precondition of change, not its enemy.

Author
Author name
Published
Reading time
1 min
Perspectives
Organization studies, Psychology

In Slack, Tom DeMarco uses a simple image: the sliding-tile puzzle. Fifteen tiles in a frame of sixteen squares. The puzzle can only be solved because one square is empty. Fill it, and nothing can move.1

The argument runs against a strong managerial instinct. Unused capacity looks like waste, and waste invites removal. DeMarco’s point is that an organization at full utilization loses something that appears on no report: the room to respond, to learn and to reorganize itself.

A related idea comes from behavioural research. Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir describe how scarcity, of money or of time, narrows attention to what is immediately pressing and leaves less capacity for everything else.2 Read together, the two books suggest that slack is not only an organizational resource but a cognitive one.

The question this leaves is not how much slack an organization can afford. It is what it is currently unable to do because it has none.

Notes

  1. DeMarco (2001). The puzzle serves as an illustration of why a fully occupied system cannot change. ↩

  2. Mullainathan & Shafir (2013). They call this narrowing of attention “tunneling.” ↩

References

  • DeMarco, T. (2001). Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency. Broadway Books.
  • Mullainathan, S., & Shafir, E. (2013). Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. Times Books.

Cite this note

Author name (2026). On slack. ELSEWISE., Issue 01. https://elsewise.ch/notes/on-slack/

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