Gerald Ajam

“Slack is waste”

Some slack is waste. Some is the ability to change course later.

Status Position

Published September 2026

All counterpositionsSystems

Usually said

“Slack is waste”

The shift

From: Cut the slack

To: Know what the slack buys

More precisely

Slack is waste when conditions are stable and option value when they are not, so a plan should say which slack it is spending and what that slack was keeping open.

In short

Unused capacity costs money, and where nothing changes, cutting it is sensible. But where conditions shift, some of that slack is what lets a school change course. Cut it and the plan works until the first surprise. The precise version asks what each piece of slack was keeping open before it goes.

The argument

From the claim to a better one

  1. The strongest formulation

    Unused capacity costs money. An hour nobody needs, a contract longer than the work, a second supplier for one job: these are real costs, and a school on a tight budget is right to cut them.

  2. Why it is attractive

    Efficiency is easy to see and easy to report. The savings arrive this year. The cost of lost flexibility arrives later, if at all, and nobody is charged for it.

  3. Where it holds

    It holds where conditions are stable and well understood: the same work and the same demand, year after year. There, slack really is unused capacity.

    Where it breaks

    It breaks where conditions shift. The spare hour is what lets a department respond when a cohort struggles. The short contract is what lets a school leave a tool that stops working. Cut them and the plan runs well until the first surprise, then cannot move.

  4. What evidence matters

    Cyert and March (1963) on organisational slack as a buffer. Bourgeois (1981) on slack as a resource for adapting, and Nohria and Gulati (1996), who find innovation rises with slack up to a point and falls beyond it. Taleb (2012) on redundancy as protection against shocks. What matters is how variable the conditions are, and what each piece of slack lets the organisation do that it otherwise could not.

  5. So, more precisely

    Slack is waste when conditions are stable and option value when they are not, so a plan should say which slack it is spending and what that slack was keeping open.

Reading it

The precise version, word by word

Slack is waste when conditions are stable and option value1 when they are not, so a plan should say which slack it is spending2 and what that slack was keeping open3.

  1. Option value

    What it is worth to be able to change course later. A one-year contract can cost more per year than a five-year one, and buys the right to leave.

  2. Which slack it is spending

    The spare time, money, people or flexibility a plan uses up, named one by one rather than counted as savings.

  3. What that slack was keeping open

    The choices the organisation loses when the slack goes: switching supplier, responding to a struggling group, trying something without cancelling something else.

What it changes in practice

  • Before cutting a buffer, write down what it lets the school do that it could not do without it.
  • Price reversibility: compare the cost of a shorter commitment with the cost of being locked in if things change.
  • Keep slack where conditions are least predictable, and cut it where they are most.

A case, in general terms

A school is offered a five-year contract for a tracking system at a lower annual price than a one-year extension. The five-year deal is cheaper on paper. It also commits the school to the system’s rating scale before anyone knows whether that scale tells teachers anything useful. The extra cost of the one-year extension buys the right to leave. Whether that is worth paying depends on how sure the school is that the scale is right.

Singapore