Why I Slack

Earlier this year, I ran a survey to get ideas about how leaders could mobilize. 1311 of you filled out the survey which mean I’m certain the results are full of good ideas and inspiration. It also means I have to mine them.

An obvious mobilization tactic was a mailing list. Sure, it’s old school, but everyone has email and it’d be a low friction approach to gather both current and aspiration leaders. I spoke at MailChimp a few years back, so I mailed the CEO and asked, “What’s the right way to set-up this mailing list?”

To his credit, Ben immediately responded with, “Why don’t you set-up a Slack?”

Right. Duh.

The New Slack Progression

Slack teams are absolutely free to set-up (brilliant), but this makes them 100% disposable (unfortunate). Friends are currently reporting “advanced Slack proliferation” where’ve they filled their Slack client with various teams. I’m currently active on five different teams, but I’m pretty sure I’ve got accounts on another five where the Slack evaluation lifecycle looked like this:

Invite arrives. Hooray!

First login. Awesome!

Introduction. I’m here!

Day #2. … so what?

For the teams I’m no longer actively participating in, the rule appears to be if I don’t have a personal connection with the team – either I’m running it, it’s full of close friends, or it’s my work – I’ve no compelling reason to return on Day #2, so I don’t.

I’m currently “running” two teams via Slack: Leadership and Destiny. The Leadership team currently has 1123 members with 100 channels. Destiny currently has 130 members and 16 channels. I consider both teams to be a success primarily because it’s been many weeks (or months in the case of the Leadership channel) daily vibrant conversation continues, the user base is still growing, and, well, I like to hang out there.

There were challenges on Day #2, but let’s first talk about Day #1:

Just a Bit of Social Friction

If you want to join one of the Slack teams, you need to send me an email.

This a laborious task, but one that I believe is essential to getting committed humans in the door. Yes, there is a web application that automatically sends an invite to the interested parties, but I want you to send a mail for two reasons.

First, while it is not necessary, I like when folks tell me why they want to join the team in their email. I don’t ask for this reasoning, but folks often send short stories about how they got into leadership and what they want to learn. While I rarely respond to these mails except with an invite, these brief introductions humanize an otherwise anonymous email address.

Second, practically, I don’t want to be a part of a community where I don’t have the time to personally invite every single human to the conversation.

Slack is not about scale. Over at Leadership, of the 1000+ users, we regularly have 200+ people actively writing on a daily basis. Divide those 200 by the 30+ regularly active channels and you’ve got a manageable set of conversations going on regarding 1:1s, hiring and interviews, presentations – heck – there is even a bookclub.

Choosing to send me a mail and having me manually respond adds just a bit of social friction to the first day, but with each new manual addition to the group, I feel I’m personally adding another human to the mix – not another number.

Make It Their Home

Day #2 is tricky because upon return to the team, the enthusiasm of Day #1 has passed and you realize the channel is full of strangers. There is no curated front page that highlights the interesting things that happened since you were last there.

Here are four Day #2 strategies:

Out of the box, Slack default channels are #general and #random. I’ve added two to the default set-up: #intros and #dailychallenge. The purpose of the first is obvious. Take a moment to introduce yourself – say as little or as much as you like – but, announce yourself to the community. It’s a small bit of ceremony that reminds us that there are humans behind the words.

Slack gives you flexibility in terms of how you configure your team as well as who has access to do said configuration. On both of my teams, I’ve left all of this power in the user’s hands. This has resulted in some brilliant hacks. The Slackbot on the Leadership channel gently corrects poorly used gender pronouns. Over at Destiny, we’ve set-up a bot that looks up Destiny gear for us. By leaving the configuration of Slack mostly up to the denizens of the team, they treat it as they would treat their home.

The first day enthusiasm often spills over into the second day with a simple request, “We should have a channel about X!” My response is a consistent and firm, “Channels are free.” Anyone can create a channel. Yes, this does mean there is a graveyard of channels amongst the 200 channels on the Leadership channel that were active for 24 hours and died, but it means that there are a handful of well-populated channels that have daily active conversations that would not have existed if channels required approval.

On #dailychallenge on Leadership, we post a daily question on the topic of leadership. The point? Give the humans a daily reason to come and converse. After running #dailychallenge for a few weeks, I handed off the baton to an active participant on the channel. Now, each week, a new Slacker runs the challenge for the week only to nominate someone else for the next. This model of an active engaged leader posting an interesting question each week day, #dailychallenge is guaranteed to have a healthy conversation on any given day with a fresh new voice each week.

The Day 2 strategies are designed to connect the community and to put the power of where it goes squarely in the hands of those who best know where to take it.

Why Slack Now?

Slack is IRC. It’s a fresh coat of paint on an idea that has been around since the late 80s. The question is: why now? Why does an idea that has been around for years gain traction now?

For a set of technologies that has been designed to connect us regardless of where we might be on the planet, the Internet is increasing impersonal and hostile.

The signal to noise ratio emitting from massive communities like Reddit or YouTube is awful. Even with legions of well-intentioned humans dedicated to enforcing basic rules of conduct, it’s still work finding the right signal and even when you do, you’re often wading through some of the most offensive parts of human behavior.

I Slack because I like hanging with my tribe. My tribe is a knowable set of humans who not only have common interests, but also shared values. This combination results in healthy and productive discourse with very little effort. There are hundreds of people on both the Slack channels I tend and we’ve had exactly *zero* incidents resulting in someone being removed from the community. This doesn’t mean there haven’t been flare ups, but when that occurs, it doesn’t escalate – it’s debated. It’s resolved. We learn and we move forward.

We’re ready for Slack because we want to feel connected. We want to make the world full of strange people feel more personal. I’m very happy to report in the months I’ve been Slacking that the group of humans I call friends has – for the first time in years – significantly grown.