Professions with a long history of studying burst capacity, like hospital nurses for instance, consistently 
come back to the finding that 80% utilization is an important threshold. When nursing ratios are set up for 80% patient care, nurses can absorb surprises, cover off for each other, keep their own skills current, and do good work. Absenteeism drops, patient outcomes improve. We've known this for a long time. The findings are similar for nuclear plants . Air traffic control staffing isn't calibrated against a typical day, but against a 90th-percentile busiest day. There's...y'know. There's a pattern here. And if your team can't handle more change, we'll bet you a dollar that they're running hotter than that. 20k of headache. 2025-04-30. Melissa & Johnathan Nightingale. article
If you’re not in a place where you can staff up, though, the other way is to reduce load.
If you're not in a place where you can staff up, though, the other way is to reduce load. We know. You hate this idea. Like, you'd love to. But this is impossible. In fact you're already being asked to do more with less and if you put up your hand and ask to do less with less, you'll be the next one out of a job. And then your colleagues would have to do even more with even less and they're already working too much and like, have you seen the state of the world out there?
We know. And we're not pretending it's easy, or straightforward. We're just telling you it's math . In grade school you probably learned that 1+2=3. And work will teach you, over and over and over again, that when you ask too few people to do too much work, the result is lower productivity, higher burnout, and an utter collapse of adaptability.