> "That was what made it great. If they wanted to sandbag it, they needed to figure out how they would make up for the lost energy elsewhere." This seems to be

> "That was what made it great. If they wanted to sandbag it, they needed to figure out how they would make up for the lost energy elsewhere." This seems to be the key quote. As a restaurant owner, as with any other type of team leader, his job is managing how the team's attention and energy is spent. Reading charitably, he doesn't want to formalize slack time into the system, because he thinks that slack will be eaten up by something else with the next process change, making the whole operation more brittle (also specifically in a restaurant setting, maximizing kitchen throughput is _not_ the same as maximizing efficient operation) I could of course be reading too much into this, but from my own experience, it's the same difference between a sensible ad hoc meeting culture and being forced to use "efficiency" tools that inevitably make meetings less productive.