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February 26, 2016
Slack. It’s not the drug, it’s the user.
This is a tale of how two medium size B2B companies that provide professional services to some of the world’s most iconic brands embraced Slack, how it affected the way they work, the value each of them derived, and how different the outcomes were resulting from its use.
Some of my colleagues don’t like it when I use the analogy of addiction related to getting people to change the way they work. They forget there are many legal, socially acceptable addictions and addictive behaviours that are as equally difficult to quit as banned substances; coffee, sugar, alcohol, cigarettes, fitness fanatics, Facebook addicts, email addicts, the list is endless.
Email is big and despite the meteoric rise of consumer messaging apps WhatsApp, Snapchat and recent arrival Slack, it continues to grow. Most of this growth comes from the business world because of course, generation Y and millennials don’t use email except for signing up to messaging apps, social media and web sites that require registration.
Email remains the most pervasive form of communication in the business world and remains the most ubiquitous form of business communication. In 2014, the majority of email traffic comes from the business world, which accounts for over 108.7 billion emails sent and received per day. Email use is growing in the business sector and by 2018, business email will account for over 139.4 billion emails sent and received per day. Business users send and receive on average 121 emails a day in 2014, and this is expected to grow to 140 emails a day by 2018. [Source: The Radicati Group]
Sei Mani’s customer engagement model is unique. We ‘go native’ and use our customer’s equipment and employee identity to deliver our services. Often, our people are managing inboxes in two or three companies, some of which have over 50,000 employees. That’s a lot of email to process. Can’t do much about that but we had to find a way to reduce our own internal email to better serve our customers. We deployed Slack two years ago. It reduced our email by 90% overnight. This is not an exaggeration. It happened that quickly. We love it. Because we’re experts in collaboration we use it for its intended purpose. That is, short messaging between individuals to replace email. We use it on the move, as an alternative to SMS because Slack’s mobile experience is slick and easy to use. We have open and closed channels but don’t use them as a substitute for ‘reply all’. Crucially, we don’t use Slack as a ‘system of record’.
We use Jive as a document repository and platform to make key decisions, store contracts, statements of work and all the other artefacts related to customer project deliveries and to collaborate with customers, partners and suppliers. We’re fanatical about analytics. Every week we get metrics about how we’ve used Slack. Pretty much every week our message stats look like this: 1% were in public channels, 18% were in private channels and 81% were direct messages. This is healthy addiction free behaviour.
In stark contrast, we spoke to another company that deployed Slack around the same time as us. Like Sei Mani, the introduction of Slack was a big hit but over a short time got out of control. Public and private channels resemble the long rants associated with deeply nested ‘reply all’ email threads. Behaviours quickly degraded to those we associate with email. “I sent a message to everyone on Slack, so my work is done”. IBM recently described dysfunctional use of Slack like this:
“People we know using Slack for any appreciable period of time feel like their information organization is totally kaput, like where did that conversation take place? People are struggling with just the basic utility of I’m having a conversation and how do I get back to the information, artefacts, content, decisions that were made?” It's on Slack might as well be replaced with 'I wrote the document you want on a needle, and it's in that haystack'.
We haven’t seen this company’s Slack metrics but based on their story we’d expect very different numbers likely describing unhealthy, email like addiction behaviour with a much larger percentage of messages published in public and private channels.
How is it that two very similar companies got completely different outcomes from using Slack? We had a very clear purpose for using Slack and our people’s day job is to help customers use less email. We already know how inefficient, inappropriate and addictive email can be and we recognised Slacks’ limits, knowing it cannot be all things to all men. Basically we had lots of practice, actually thousands of hours of using a wide range of collaboration apps. The employees of the other company had zero practice and didn’t offer a broad range of real time and asynchronous apps, so people can choose the medium of communication that best suits them. As a result, the behaviours associated with email were transferred undiluted to Slack.
There’s a frequently used refrain in the world of drug addiction counsellors: If you can’t find the drug you need, you’ll want the drug you can get. That’s why it’s not the drug it’s the user.
Note to Slack: About ten years ago, Clay Shirky carried out an experiment with email centric forums. He wanted to test what happens when the forum automatically publishes usage statistics back to the community. He made a startling find. When a user knows they’re posting the most (or being the loudest in the room) they massively reduced their posts to accommodate other people. That’s why you should provide an option for administrators to automatically post usage stats to the whole community and include leader boards with the number of hours being consumed by each user. This will lead to much healthier behaviours.
June 21, 2015
May 07, 2015
May 01, 2015
The Right To Reject: General Election
We need a fundamental change in the electoral system so it includes a check box on the ballot paper, along with the list of the candidates that says:
Not good enough. Go back and find some better candidates because most (but not all) of you are pretty crap.
Here's why. Quoting Robert Lion, France, circa 2007
Let's stop claiming to dominate nature and the world; let's stop making possession a superior end. Let's put our cherished deviancies, such as themanufacture of desire and its bulimic satisfaction, back in their place.Humanity's progress must be situated on the side of being rather than of having.
...and for our so called leaders;
Let us dream: A politician takes the side of talking to us about the world as it is, as it risks becoming; he or she forecasts not sweat and tears, but difficult tomorrows; she or he proposes that we talk about it, as responsible citizens, and allows us to perceive robust paths along which to advance, with a smile, towards the era of less ... A less that will consequently take on the character of better.
Do any of our leaders think this way?
April 14, 2015
People on demand. There's an app for that.
I was part of, and used to write a lot about a Scottish based start up called ki work founded by Michael Wolff. ki work tried to bring the concept of teams to the on demand, fractional working economy. A kind of Odesk for teams. Sadly, after nearly 10 years of development ki work has been dissolved. RIP.
This is what Michael had to say:
The experience with letting go of Ki Work has been an interesting time for reflection. I’ve been developing Internet projects now for 20 years. I don’t think anyone was more enthusiastic or more evangelical. So what went wrong?
I’ve been reading an interesting book that maybe explains why: The Internet Is Not The Answer. See also this Guardian review.
My belief was that the Internet was going to empower people to create their own businesses. What has happened is the opposite. A few immensely powerful monopolies have sprung up, and wherever you look, it’s winner takes all. In whatever niche I look at, there are a handful of big winners, with thousands of losers.
So that does create an opportunity: how to build structures on top of these monopolies that will enable the masses to get a fair share of the cake.
The book gives a chilling vision of the future, where over the next fifteen years most knowledge-based services will end up like Kodak – completely decimated and millions of jobs destroyed. So, what will the new jobs look like?
And talking about fractional work, the book refers to the ultimate in fractional working, a kind of Uber for work called Task Rabbit, from the worker’s perspective, the ultimate in zero contract working.
*******
In 2005, I created some cartoons for my book Winning By Sharing, ostensibly about how social software changes the nature of work. Here's the one for the chapter called People on Demand.
Fast forward 10 years and the Economist published this cover in January this year.
What will the new jobs look like?
Economist draws very similar, somewhat veiled conclusions as Michael Wolff:
"But even if governments adjust their policies to a more individualistic age, the on-demand economy clearly imposes more risk on individuals. People will have to master multiple skills if they are to survive in such a world—and keep those skills up to date. Professional sorts in big service firms will have to take more responsibility for educating themselves. People will also have to learn how to sell themselves, through personal networking and social media or, if they are really ambitious, turning themselves into brands. In a more fluid world, everybody will need to learn how to manage You Inc.
Michael's observation about how 'winners take all' is true but the universe's power law or the 80/20 rule is everywhere. I don't have all the answers but there's an opportunity for someone to aggregate all the sources of work (Odesk, Elance, Task Rabbit, PeoplePerHour, TaskSquad and so on) to remove the cost/effort of search for fractional workers so that work comes to them, and they're able to easily create a 'whole job' from a number of part time sources of work.
..and that's the opportunity Michael alludes to when he asks, how to build structures on top of these monopolies that will enable the masses to get a fair share of the cake?
Foot note:
I never anticipated a side effect of fractional work described recently in a post called the Shut-in economy.
In the new world of on-demand everything, you’re either pampered, isolated royalty — or you’re a 21st century servant. Well worth a read on the impact of on demand work on society and communities.
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