Cut Yourself Some Slack From Slack
To maintain the continuity with my 3-part article on the leadership side of the software architect role, today I want to dig further, into the intersection of mentoring + nurturing and keeping everyone informed. If we want to encourage strategic and high-level thinking at our organizations, we need to be mindful about our choices with regard of learning tools & practices. Many softdev startups project themselves as learning hubs, as they provide space and opportunities for knowledge & information sharing to their employees. The million dollar question is: does any knowledge & information sharing actually leads to learning something? Or, is everyone sheepishly content with how information sharing gone havoc consumes people’s energy with no tangible benefits, but with some serious damage done to mental, emotional, and physical health & well-being?
Some of us who have been around in the softdev industry for a while might not be strangers to a special kind of bitterness. Seemingly, our organization has all kinds of collaboration tools in place, e.g. messenger apps, work managements apps, corporate social networks, but as we sift and sift through the tons of messages… we do not get the information and knowledge that would be vital both for our professional growth & development, and for unlocking our personal potential. For some of us, Slack, the incumbent corporate messenger, has become synonymous with some kind of an energy vampire. We waste our precious mental energy on switching focus and on multitasking, as we get distracted by Slack, but… Slack doesn’t seem to cut ourselves some slack, not anymore. Presumably, Slack’s creators have intended this app as a tool for some light distraction from focused work — or for some real-time brief messaging. However, Slack stands no chance as a viable async source of work-related knowledge and information. Yet, for some reason, we keep thinking of it as such… and unwittingly slide into self-destructive behaviors since, because of Slack, our focus is stolen from meaningful tasks.
Someone might say: well, it’s up to you, you can opt out of keeping up-to-date with Slack feeds any time. But, what if someone wants to be in the know of the organizational developments that go beyond their immediate work domain? As a side note, as I’ve observed, those who are genuinely curious about the interrelatedness of the org trends and events oftentimes hold the potential of evolving into strategic leaders and thinkers! As software architects, or product owners, or team leads, or UX architects, or whoever else in the position of what we refer to as “tech leadership”. Such budding leaders crave the breeding ground to which they can apply their sprouting high-level thinking! Now, why wouldn’t a stakeholder of a learning organization be immensely concerned with putting an ecological info-sharing environment at place? Only due to a lack of awareness, it seems. Despite the overwhelming evidence — as much as I’m skeptical of things being acknowledged “scientifically”, just because the mainstream science mostly excels at “proving” the obvious common sense truisms these days — many still seem to underrate the effort put into the acts of processing information, all kinds of them.
As people engage in direct learning by attending educational events, conferences, seminars, by taking a course online, or just by reading up on all kinds of work-related subjects, the attention investment pays off mostly (unless there’s another pattern in place of which I wrote earlier). The ecology of learning is safe, no soot in the air. When it gets to a lack of discernment between the purposes of sync and async information sharing, however, the magnitude of pollution is no smaller than the one produced by clouds of ashes from a volcanic eruption. Many of us remember how an Icelandic volcano with a tongue-breaker of a name — and the name would be Eyjafjallajökull, it’s just so easier to copy-paste the name than to say it :) — blocked the air traffic over Europe back in 2010 affecting ~10 million air travellers. No wonder that people get so desperate — back to our subject — that they want to quit Slack for good! It’s tempting to throw a baby out with the bath water, as shown here and here, and this would be an easy job. Or, it would be equally tempting to switch to another real-time messaging app because — again — it’s so much easier to copy-paste some other org’s behavior than to design a healthy and authentic info-sharing environment suited to the particular setup and needs of your organization.
Get ready for another deep dive into the nooks & crannies of human nature as I’m going to suggest some principles and ideas for custom knowledge/info-sharing architecture design in my next article!
