Make a Slack watercooler: a space for your team to share half-baked ideas

By peterhartree @ 2023-09-25T06:19 (+23)

(A quick note, which someone encouraged me to share on the Forum.)

People on your team should have places to share quick thoughts and half-baked ideas to their colleagues with very low effort^[1].

One way to create such a space is to make a #half-baked-ideas channel on Slack.

Tell your team something like:

• This is a place to share quick thoughts and half-baked ideas.
• Post things here with no expectation that anyone will reply or act on them. If you have a proposal or other message that requires action, use a different channel.
• Have a very low bar for posting things. If the channel gets too busy to follow, we'll raise the bar a bit and post examples of things that seem above and below the bar.

You might explain that the aim of the channel is something like:

• Increase the number of “spark” moments where someone shares something that is on their mind, then another team member riffs or runs with it, or encourages the poster to develop it.
• Reduce situations where many people are thinking similar things without enough confidence or time to propose a concrete next step.

I set this up at 80,000 Hours. In the first two years we posted ~2.6K messages and replies (an average of 3.6 per day). This makes it one of our most active Slack channels, and perhaps among the most valuable.

1. ^{^}

   In general: if you'd like people to do more of something, make it easy.