What does this mean? It means rather than starting from a point where you choose what to share, you start from a point where you chose what not to share.

You begin sharing by default.

Problem

Keeping everyone in a company both engaged and informed gets increasingly difficult as the company grows. In a small startup where everyone sits together, the internal communications function may consist of shouting across the room or listening in on each other's phone calls.

But in a bigger organization, it's hard to find the right balance between communicating too little and communicating too much about what is going on. Don't communicate enough, and employees start to fill in the blanks themselves, often with misinformation at best and conspiracy theories at worst. Communicate too much, and they'll turn you into a Dilbert-esque demon, wasting their time with mindless meetings and updates when they could be getting stuff done.

The rub? Communicating too much and too little both negatively impact employee engagement, and unhappy employees aren't great innovators.

So how do you find the sweet spot in the middle?

Solution

The solution is very simple. In the traditional management model, people tend to keep things closed by default, whether they mean to or not. Closed doors. Closed meetings. Private person-to-person emails versus messages on public mailing lists.

Just flip that on its head. Default to open, and then make smart decisions about which things have to be closed instead of making decisions about which things should be opened.

Here's an example:

In my old group at Red Hat, we were lucky enough to have the opportunity to help design our own office space. As part of the space design, we determined that we wanted no offices– everyone would be in a large, open collaborative space. Everyone had the same sized cubes, and it didn’t matter how much of a muckety-muck you were or weren’t.

If you wanted to have a private conversation, the space design included a series of private alcoves, where you could go talk with your doctor, or yell at your wife, or whatever you didn’t want to do in public. But the key is that you had to actively decide when placing a call, do I want to take this in private? Which is counter than the old-skool office design where you had an office with a door, and all conversations were private by default.

We also ensured there was a big public space adjacent to the cubes with no door (i.e. not a “meeting room”) so that when brainstorming sessions were happening, the people sitting nearby could participate however they wanted. In some cases, this meant the folks near the meeting would put their headphones on and ignore what was happening. But in other cases they passively listened, with perhaps a nugget of a new idea or two seeping into their heads every few minutes. And sometimes they actively engaged in the conversation from their desks, calling out a few ideas that helped the team.

This principle applies well beyond the design of physical space. At Red Hat, we applied it to everything from designing the values and mission of the company to strategic planning to everyday "water cooler" conversation.

Practical Impact

The most important impact of defaulting to open is that it allows you to hit that sweet spot between communicating too much and communicating too little, leading to happier, more engaged employees.

Why? When you default to open, everyone can set the dial for what they want to know themselves.

You can still control which information, conversations, get shared. You may just tend to share more than you ever thought to share in the past.
Your employees get to set their own threshold for how much they want to hear and contribute. Because you are sharing more information by default, they are less likely to think you are holding back. But if you are sharing too much, they can always put on proverbial headphones and tune the extra information out. They get to control their own flow of information.

As a a manager, the biggest impact when everyone is defaulting to open is that you actually know what is going on around you. You overhear conversations. You can pass on a tidbit of useful advice over a cube wall. You can see who is actually in the office. You see gossip on mailing lists that you otherwise would have missed.

First Steps

Here are a couple of small things you can do to get started:

If you have a door on your office, leave it open. Encourage others to do the same.
If your online calendar is private by default, consider making it public, and only making events private that need to be private.
Host an open-door meeting.
Publish your meeting notes on a mailing list or intranet. If appropriate, consider publishing them on the Internet as well (this is what most good open source software projects do).
Start writing a blog to publish your thoughts whether others can see them.
Buy a pair of headphones so you can tune out the stuff you don't want to hear.
Buy some awesome music to play through the headphones. I'm digging The Local Natives, Sleigh Bells, and The Love Language right now.

Credits

Thanks to Matthew Szulik and Red Hat for giving me the opportunity to work in an open source culture like Red Hat for 10 years. I learned a lot about leadership from Matthew and my Red Hat experience.

This particular principle is critical to the way most good open source software projects are run. In fact, most open source engineers would read this hack and think "doesn't it happen this way everywhere?" So thanks to them for the inspiration as well.

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August 8, 2010 at 12:34pm

Raj Kumar

'Open by default' appears to be designed for the accident of the other - the uninvited - person litening in. If uninvited listeners are not attracted perhaps it implies that some more customer oriented thought is required! However, encouragement of follow up and feedback at conveniece, and they are central to collective effort particularly among distributed personnel, would perhaps still require a compelling system to overcome the demands on time and energy.

Q: Is the solution top down, i.e., a part of the culture defined by the organization? It will be interesting to know how it was sold.

August 9, 2010 at 4:26am

Chris Grams

Hi Raj--

To answer your question, yes, it was absolutely a key part of the culture at Red Hat. I'm not sure whether I'd describe it as top down or bottom up... maybe both at once, since the idea of doing everything out in the open by default was first practiced by engineers working with the open source community. Then later the practice was adopted and supported by senior management in the internal culture once they saw how effective it was in getting work done in the open source community.

And yes, it is designed for happy accidents.The collaboration that would not have occurred before now has a chance!

August 31, 2010 at 7:21am

Ellen Weber

Thanks for this thoughtful Hack, Chris, I gather hope from all you are doing here to engage employees - and especially like the focus on music that can take your focus to places that you need to go. It does just that - and few capitalize on its capabilities for the workplace.

The employees who have keen interpersonal strategies will seek you out and will use their communication skills to leverage what they have to offer against what they wish to gain.

How - on the other hand - do you engage the highly talented staff member who possesses far fewer interpersonal skills to approach you but who'd benefit from an opportunity to speak and feel heard? Thoughts?

September 11, 2010 at 7:57am

Rohit Kashyap

Hello Chris

I have read your hack with the following criteria in mind:
- The need is to evolve out of Command & Control. Does the hack define an alternative?
- The alternative must be compelling. It must recognize the need to overcome the constraints of time, energy and motivation.
- An alternative without the use of technology is unlikely to succeed.
- The alternative must create a constructive collective by intrinsic means, i.e., desist from 'brain-washing' personnel for discipline and organization.

I agree that 'Open' needs to become the theme of the work place. As an architect I would say the concept of ‘Open-Office’ is a theme offered to clients since quite some time. I emphasize the word ‘theme’ since Open-Office does not drive the Open philosophy. There is much more to the philosophy like intrinsic motivation. Default to Open does not create Time or Energy or Motivation. It also does not extend the physical boundary created by worker distribution across space and time, i.e., ignores workers who are absent when the conversation takes place.