Why your process needs slack

Let's say you and the team keep a sustainable pace, are productive, and always have enough useful tasks to keep you busy.

Should you fill your entire work time with those tasks?

Many teams do exactly that. Whether it's their choice or not, they're always "fully loaded."

Yet, even if you use all your time and energy productively, you're giving something up.

That something is the opportunities you weren't aware of when you made plans for that time. They are opportunities to change something: develop a capability, pursue a simpler solution, innovate, reconsider the plan, improve the process.

Opportunities don't care for your sprint backlogs or roadmaps. Opportunities don't always make themselves clearly noticeable, either. Taking advantage of them can be difficult when you already have your work cut out for you, and when promises were made.

If such opportunities to change are important to you, make it easier to notice and process them. How? incorporate slack in your process.

Slack is that extra time you set aside for thinking about the work, especially creative or complex work. Keeping slack is a deliberate attempt to expand your mind, to consider more inputs and ideas, and to amplify learning.

Slack is not a buffer you reserve for crunch time, unplanned work, or underestimated commitments. You know what happens to buffers.

Examples:

• Agile retrospectives are a form of structured, recurring slack used for reflecting on ways of working.
• Attending courses, conferences, and meetups is a learning-oriented form of slack.
• Pairing with a teammate on a task lets both of you have unstructured slack: while one types or writes, the other can think.
• A hackathon is an innovation- and experimentation-minded kind of slack.
• Blocking 30 minutes (daily) in your calendar protects an opportunity to think. And if you don't happen to be feeling introspective or creative, just use the time for regular work.

Whether structured or unstructured, regular or sporadic, slack has to be protected -- perhaps by an individual leader or by the entire team. And, teams need to have some decision-making ability (autonomy) so they may use that time well.

Suggested next step: at your next retro, lead the team in identifying where you don't have enough slack, why that's the case, and how you can improve the situation.