Translucent communication anti-pattern

Translucent Communication

Is having resources or communication channels that are open to find and join, but people are not aware that they exist.

In constrast; opaque communication is private and closely guarded, transparent communication is public and shared. Translucent communication fits halfway between opaque and transparent.

Concrete Example

Today I learned this lesson, as we have ‘steering’ slack channels and ‘leadership updates’ notion pages that are both translucent. If you’d gone looking in our notion space, or searched our slack directory you would have found them, and we may have even mentioned the slack channel before, but the updates-to-leadership are only a few weeks old and we hadn’t announced those to the team.

When a team mate ‘discovered’ these translucent updates they weren’t happy and rightly called it out.

Culture Smells

We tell ourselves we’re saving people from “all the messages” they’d have to read, or “it’s only status updates, you already know this stuff”.

We tell ourselves that this is being transparent, but it’s not - it’s being translucent.

Lesson Learnt

Now the team knows the channels and pages are there, now we’re all transparent.

There’s more discussion to be had around what kind of communication goes where, but that’s not what this article is about. The first step is to make sure people are clear on where they can find all relevant communication, where relevant is judged by all of us individually.

I ask the reader to consider their own communication, do you have any translucent channels or pages that you should make transparent?

Maybe share them with your team mates today.