shrinkage Slack is the opposite of organizational memory(5)

These points are part of a larger tug of war between middle managers and programmers. That argument is out of scope for this article, except to say that pervasive chat empowers middle managers (i.e. people who like to check in a lot) to do so, at the expense of your creatives’ well-being and your long-term organizational health.

Why are people blind to this? I think because most people never understood how work gets done or don’t think about it. Now slack comes in and makes ‘work’ visible in the form of instant replies to quick questions, dancing emoji stickers, and nonstop chatter, and some people are like, ‘yes! look at all that my team has accomplished’.

I think most people agree that when knowledge workers work together on teams they need to use writing to agree on what to do. On slack the quality of that writing is plumbing new depths. There’s a world of difference between a well-considered G doc that has been edited by multiple people vs a stream of consciousness mixed in with people’s WFH announcements and ‘look what my cat did’.

24/7 reachability also hurts good docs practices. When people couldn’t get ahold of each other at all hours orgs had to design for redundancy, i.e. write things down such that they could be understood by someone else. But there’s a whole generation of workers and even companies that never experienced that.

The information critical to your company’s ops is stored in three places:

brains

documents (including email)

software

The slack model increases the percent of your company’s critical decisions that rely on a specific brain. Good luck with that.

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