As mentioned at the end: I really appreciate AgileBits' effort and openness on writing and publishing this post – thanks for sharing! <3
I still hope it is ok to critisize what jumps out of the page for me...
Post in question: Curing Our Slack Addiction on the AgileBits Blog.
I posted this on twitter:
I hear “not enough discipline, communication culture and setting boundaries, let’s blame the tool”
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That’s harsh. The post makes it quite clear that Slack didn’t work for them and explains the reasoning in detail.
Yes, that is one half. Take this paragraph for example:
The reality is we could make Slack work for us but it would require constant policing. I simply don’t want to be that bad cop, and I don’t want to hire a police force either. Furthermore, Slack was not designed for the deep, meaningful conversations that are needed to move 1Password forward.
So they kinda admit that choosing chat was the wrong choice for "deep, meaningful conversations" (though blaming slack specifically, as if that been diffferent on any other chat).
Saying "we could make slack work for us, but..." tells me "we don't wanna".
I wrote
I hear “not enough discipline, communication culture and setting boundaries, let’s blame the tool”
So let me follow up with examples:
- Slack was simply too good for us to resist and as a result we preferred using it over all the other tools at our disposal.
That isn't "doesn't work for me", that is making a faulty choice of tool.
- If you were on a phone call with a customer and were stymied by a technical issue you weren’t prepared for, you would use use the global @ channel notification to make sure you got an answer in real time.
Reads to me like a lack of respect for your coworker's time and attention. Why would people continually do that? Isn't there feedback in place to stop people from doing that? If they don't stop after receiving feedback, of course it needs to be enforced imo. Calling it "policing" is puts in a bad light. I expect setting boundaries and protecting everyone's saneness from my heads of, leads, etc...
In the event that you found a bug you would simply mention it in one of the channels and expect that it would be taken care of.
I guess the correct place for bugs is a bug tracker. Again, if people don't do that, there needs to be feedback and if that doesn't help, enforcement.
When you couldn’t remember why 1Password behaves the way it does in a particular situation, your first instinct would be to switch to Slack and ask. And since everyone’s addiction was as strong as yours, you were sure to get someone’s attention.
I expect of my coworkers to not follow their "first instincts" but to keep a calm, reflected head and think of the impact their actions have on the people around them. Not doing that is just careless and puts others in the position of having to defend themselves. Not ok. Who is taking responsibility for that in the company?
All of these interactions would happen in Slack, despite there being many other tools that are better suited. Tools like bug trackers and wikis would allow answers to be preserved so future questions wouldn’t even have to be asked but they weren’t as fun.
We all knew how great it would be to have a repository of knowledge for people to find their answers, but Slack was simply too good at providing the quick fix we all needed. Copying these answers from Slack to a permanent location didn’t release the same endorphins provided by Slack, so it seldom happened.
I expect people to use the appropiate tools, not to follow "quick endorphine fixes".
At this point, let me express my disagreement on using the whole addiction metaphor in the first place. The article is even titled "Curing Our Slack Addiction". If you ever knew a person struggling with real addiction, and you still think this is funny, you're imo missing a chunk of empathy here :/
for some reason most of us think that communication is simply a tooling problem and completely ignore the human aspect. In reality people are the most important piece of the puzzle, so we should simply teach them how to communicate better, right? If only it was that easy.
Most of us? Really? Are you sure? Who exactly is "we" here? And nobody I know ever said that teaching is easy.
For many months myself and a few others have been trying to make Slack work for us. We would be the bad cops and point out people’s bad behaviour and suggest alternatives.
Again the "bad cop" metaphor. If giving feedback and setting good communication conventions which work for everyone is generally seen as bad-copping, I'd suggest having a look at that. Yeah, that is not easy. Yeah, you might have to pay somebody to remove your blind spot and yeah, that will probably hurt for a moment. I like to think of that as "taking responsibility for past actions".
Unfortunately it didn’t work. The allure of the always on nature of Slack and instant gratification was just too strong to resist.
It doesn't get more tool-blamey than this imo. This is what I mean by "lack of discipline" on the one hand and "lack of setting boundaries" on the other. Even if others cannot resist pushing the button, there is still a "do not disturb" mode that allows you to completely focus even with slack on. I know people who simple quit chat when they want to do focused work.
What could be possibly so important that it needs instant reply? Imo, only production outage. That is why on-call teams still rely on phones which they are not allowed to leave out of sight. All of this is part of how you communicate and independent from choice of tool.
Actually, it does get more blamey afterwards: "Does Slack make me look and feel like a dick?"
No, it doesn't. No hammer ever "made" somebody a sculptor nor a killer.
"Doesn't work for me" is not an analysis and it is not looking for the deeper reasons why something didn't work.
I really appreciate AgileBits' effort on writing this post – thanks for sharing! :)
I still hope it is ok to critisize what jumps out of the page for me. I'm not saying that I am "better" or the company I work in is "better". I just look at the past of my own and other's communication and kaizen efforts and it seems to me that wrong choice of tool for the job combined with a lack of discipline, focus and feedback culture is being blamed here on tool A, and tool B is now being expected to fix all of it.
Yes, threaded communication is better for some use cases. No tool will ever cure a lack of culture though. Only teaching, learning and open feedback will do that. It is hard, is costly, but from my experience it is vital. Software is about people :)
Peace and <3
I couldn't say it better