Capacity must be maintained deliberately, because the activity that consumes it will always seem more urgent than the maintenance.
Covey's image is the woodcutter too busy sawing to sharpen. The structural point is that maintenance is never urgent, so a system driven by urgency will never do it, which means it has to be scheduled rather than fitted in. The same logic governs technical debt, training budgets and preventive maintenance.
In practice
- A team with no slack cannot improve the process that is consuming it, and the shortage is self-sustaining.
- A machine serviced on a calendar outlasts one serviced when someone has time.
- Standing
- Consistent with research on recovery and on the job demands-resources model, where resources buffer demands rather than merely offsetting them.
- Subject
- Creativity & Work
- Essay
- Protecting the conditions for good work