I went down a rabbit hole doing research for a roundup of leadership resources (work in progress).

After reviewing my favorite articles saved to Instapaper and shared on Twitter over the last few years, I turned to Slack for diverse, trustworthy, unsolicited articles on the topic from the people that make the best content on the web - my coworkers.

While scrolling for cherries on leadership, I put on a lab coat, zooming out from the microscopic view of individual articles shared to marvel at our organizational behavior, searching for patterns and non-obvious problems.

At my last company, I got my start running support and implementation teams. When I joined, we were making the fast and slow transition from service as a software to true SaaS, pushing our engineering team past perceived limits into undocumented territory.

We reacted more than we planned, asking for the same just in time help on a litany of issues over and over again. Our developer team, feeling enough pain, pulled a ripcord. They offered to devote resources to fix technical debt, provide training, and help with documentation.

I had a gut level sense of where the main problems were, but still spent a day trolling Slack messages to uncover the biggest areas of opportunity on our team to guide our next steps.

The reason for reading 1000s of messages on Slack differed, but the outcome was the same - in a few hours, I learned enough about our team, our company, and our processes to see and start to solve for areas of opportunity.

Binge reading Slack is one of the highest leverage activities remote managers can do.

Slack is both episodic and serial, but companies that grow quickly automate the episodic so that talent can focus on the evolution of the company’s serial storyline.

Some channels follow a predictable formula; here’s X customer issue, and we’re doing Y about it. Drama is created by opening messages that put the bottom line up front, or while waiting for the sentence that comes after the subject line. Each team member plays their archetypal role.

Storylines on other, smaller channels evolve serially, building on previous events in less predictable ways. The cast and crew are the same everyday. The threads are loose but clear. From the creators of Succession, here’s how we’re thinking about the next iteration of X. Serial communication is harder, it’s higher level, it’s higher leverage, and it’s where organizations that employ knowledge workers have to excel.

Binge reading, you see stuff that you miss when you’re zoomed in. Patterns in communication preferences, team engagement, company challenges, development opportunities, emerging trends, and knowledge gaps jump off the screen. Where do threads go 50 messages deep, and how do those messages feel, +/-? This is how we work, and how we don’t.

You see bodies of work: yours, your coworkers’, your company’s. It’s an illuminating, hilarious and possibly painful exercise in awareness of self and whole.

In the last 30 days, I’ve posted 3,136 messages. This isn’t a humble brag; I’m that person who communicates in single lines, often mindlessly prioritizing efficiency over efficacy. Scrolling back through messages, 4 questions came up:

Do we solve the cause of problems or just the problems (or worse, none of the above?)
Are team members contributing at the “right” level? Why or why not?
What is our philosophy behind/how do we think about [TOPIC]?
Does the way we communicate align with or depart from our core values?

As a company grows, so should conversations. Some channels are episodic in nature because of the information that needs to be shared: breaking news, routine updates, your regularly scheduled programming. You can’t cancel the news.

The level of discourse is set by the experience of team members, which determines the collective ability to contribute meaningfully. Experience comes from time on the job but also company infrastructure. The less experience a team member or an area of the company has, the more repetitive the content created and consumed is.

Slack channels that are episodic in nature operate at the foundational process level.

Process level

Question: team member asks a question/shares a problem and someone else offers a potential solution
Question + ad hoc solution: team member asks a question and shares a potential solution
Question + documented process: team member asks a question and someone else shares a documented process
Question asked asynchronously through a knowledge base: team member goes to a resource outside of Slack to ask a question

Ideally, the question only comes up a few times before the response moves from manual to semi-automatic to fully automated.

In reality, many of the conversations that happen in episodic channels get stuck on steps 1 and 2. We’re often too busy putting out fires as when they burn to stop the gas leak at the source.

When reviewed regularly, Slack highlights structural gaps that slow employee and organizational ability to level up. We need the reminder. Company fires are rarely isolated incidents, addressing them as such makes for predictable TV. You eventually grow out of enjoying the Scooby Doo mystery machine.

Process is a great answer for things that need to be automated, but can be antithetical to how knowledge workers want to work and their ability to make something better than whatever existed before. As leaders, our mission, then, is to provide the context (through tools like Slack) to help people make better decisions:

In Content Over Control: The Future of Remote Work, Leonardo Federico noted:

Context incentivizes individual autonomy and independent decision making
Control, on the other side, incentivizes centralized decision-making and high individuals inter-dependency

One of the most striking gaps in reading 1000s of messages was the handful of people that regularly share their thoughts and ideas about the work that we do. The most experienced contribute the most, giving others the opportunity to listen and learn, but creating a perception of restricted practical growth. How do you play when you’re unsure of the rules of the game, or feeling consumed at the process level?

Netflix has solved for this at the culture level. Reed Hastings, CEO at Netflix, wrote:

We strive to develop good decision-making muscle everywhere in our company. We pride ourselves on how few, not how many, decisions senior management makes. We don’t want hands-off management, though. Each leader’s role is to teach, to set context, and to be highly informed of what is happening. The only way to figure out how the context setting needs to improve is to explore a sample of the details. But unlike the micro-manager, the goal of knowing those details is not to change certain small decisions, but to learn how to adjust context so more decisions are made well. There are some minor exceptions to “context not control,” such as an urgent situation in which there is no time to think about proper context and principles, or when a new team member hasn’t yet absorbed enough context to be confident, or when it’s recognized that the wrong person is in a decision-making role (temporarily, no doubt).

As episodic issues are resolved, team members can spend more time contributing in more creative, high level channels and ways, focusing on ideas and thoughts instead of just people and/or events.

Because the modern organization consists of knowledge specialists, it has to be an organization of equals, of colleagues and associates. No knowledge ranks higher than another; each is judged by its contribution to the common task rather than by any inherent superiority or inferiority. Therefore, the modern organization cannot be an organization of boss and subordinate. It must be organized as a team…As more and more organizations become information-based, they are transforming themselves into soccer or tennis teams, that is, into responsibility-based organizations in which every member must act as a responsible decision maker. All members, in other words, have to see themselves as “executives.” - Peter Drucker, The New Society of Organizations

Every few months, Slack comes up as a cause of endless distraction for the team of people we have that need to spend the vast majority of their time focused on creative knowledge work.

There is the split between “literati” and “managers.” Both are needed: the former to produce knowledge, the latter to apply knowledge and make it productive. But the former focus on words and ideas, the latter on people, work, and performance. There is the threat to the very basis of the society of organizations—the knowledge base—that arises from ever greater specialization, from the shift from knowledge to knowledges. But the greatest and most difficult challenge is that presented by society’s new pluralism. - Peter Drucker, The New Society of Organizations

The reality is, the tool is rarely the problem; the way it’s used and why it’s used that way is what leads to destructive distraction. Are we fixing the surface level problem or the actual cause of the problem? Are we tuning into a predictable show or going somewhere new that requires novel thought and creates surprise?

Reviewed over time Slack, and more globally, the systems that send you notifications late into the night, can help you evaluate your company’s performance and find unexpected places that you can create leverage for yourself and your team.