You’ve probably done it. Or at least thought about doing it. Someone cuts across your lane, nearly clips your front bumper and forces you onto the brakes. You hit the horn. Maybe you yell something through the windshield. Perhaps you offer a hand gesture that leaves little doubt about your assessment of the other driver’s judgment.

What’s interesting isn’t the anger. It’s the barrier. Most of us wouldn’t react the same way if we were standing two feet from that person in an elevator. We certainly wouldn’t walk up to a stranger in a grocery store and deliver the same commentary we’d comfortably shout through a windshield.

The car gives us a layer of protection. We’re physically separated, temporarily anonymous and reasonably confident the encounter will soon be over. The barrier changes our behavior. Something similar is happening inside our companies. It’s called Slack. Read on and see if you have some slackers in your midst.

When Communication Changes Command

I remember encountering an early version of this problem at sea. Battle group operations have always depended on communications, and over generations navies moved from flags and flashing lights to radio, HF, UHF, microwave, satellite communications and increasingly sophisticated digital networks. Each advance promised greater speed, precision and reach.

Then chat arrived. For the first time, we could transmit something approaching an order directly to an individual operator sitting at a particular console on another ship. It was extraordinarily efficient. An instruction could travel many miles and appear almost instantly in front of exactly the person positioned to execute it.

But there was a problem hidden inside that efficiency: other people might never see or hear it. An instruction that once would have traveled through a command circuit—heard, acknowledged and understood by multiple people—could suddenly arrive through a discreet digital channel. The technology hadn’t merely improved communications. It had changed the architecture of command.

That forced us to revisit an old military question: What should be centralized, what should be decentralized, and where does the control of command actually reside?

The military is famous for command and control, but command and control has never been static.

Technology continually changes what’s possible.

But just because a commander can reach directly into an organization doesn’t mean the commander always should. Sometimes the intermediary isn’t bureaucracy. It’s context. The officer or supervisor between the commander and the operator may understand why the order was given, how it relates to everything else happening around it and whether executing it creates an unintended consequence somewhere else.

Removing friction can increase speed. It can also remove context.

Slack Did the Same Thing to the Office

This is what makes Slack more interesting than another piece of workplace software. Slack removes friction from corporate communication, which is largely why companies adopted it. Instead of scheduling a meeting, making a phone call or composing an email, I can send a thought instantly to an individual or group.

That’s useful. But friction performed functions we didn’t necessarily recognize until we removed it. Before sending an email to eight people, you generally thought about what you were going to say. Before calling a meeting, someone had to decide the subject warranted everyone’s time. Before walking into someone’s office to challenge an idea, you had to look that person in the eye. Those weren’t merely inefficiencies. They were behavioral governors.

Slack dramatically lowers the cost of saying something. A thought becomes a message in seconds. Someone responds. Another person adds an emoji. Two more people pile on. A channel forms. A private channel forms. A side conversation begins. What began as communications infrastructure can gradually become social infrastructure. And social infrastructure creates groups.

Four Generations, Different Rules

By my estimation, four generations are reading this newsletter, and at least three are likely represented in almost any group work dynamic. Each entered the workplace with different expectations about hierarchy, access and how openly information should move. Some of us learned that communication generally traveled through established chains and that access to senior leaders came with position. Others entered a workplace where texting, group chats and social platforms made direct, decentralized communication entirely normal. Neither perspective is inherently right or wrong, but they can collide.

What one generation sees as healthy transparency, another may see as bypassing authority; what one sees as appropriate candor, another may interpret as unprofessional; and what one considers an efficient digital conversation, another may view as a decision being shaped outside the room. Leaders managing across generations can’t assume everyone shares the same unwritten rules of communication—because increasingly, they don’t.

The Org Chart Is Only Half the Story

Every leadership team has an org chart. The positions of the boxes often tell us where formal authority resides. They don’t necessarily tell us where the power resides.

I’ve watched leadership teams, corporate committees and nonprofit boards where one person could move an entire group. Sometimes it’s the loudest person. Sometimes it’s the person with the longest tenure or strongest relationships. Sometimes it’s simply the person who arrives knowing more about the subject than everyone else. Often, it’s not the most senior person in the room.

That isn’t necessarily bad. Informal power has always existed, and healthy organizations benefit from people whose credibility, expertise or judgment gives them influence beyond their title. The problem comes when influence becomes direction without anyone quite recognizing that it happened.

A group starts in one place. Someone makes a strong assertion. Another person agrees. A few people remain silent. The conversation moves. Twenty minutes later, the group is heading down a lane that may not be in the organization’s best interest, yet nobody can identify the moment when the decision was actually made.

Slack can amplify this dynamic because the “room” is no longer obvious. Influence can be exercised before the meeting ever begins. An idea gets floated in a channel. A few people endorse it. Someone shares an article supporting it. A side conversation develops. By the time the issue reaches the formal leadership meeting, a portion of the group has already formed a position. The meeting may look like deliberation. In reality, much of the deliberation may have already occurred somewhere else.

The org chart tells you who reports to whom.

Slack may tell you who actually influences whom.

When Channels Become Cliques

None of this is unique to Slack. People have always gathered around the coffee pot, gone to lunch together, complained about the boss or compared notes about another department. Informal networks are part of every human institution.

But those conversations once had natural limits. Lunch ended. The coffee break was over. Everyone returned to work. Digital channels persist. They accumulate history, participants, inside jokes, grievances and increasingly shared interpretations of what’s happening elsewhere in the company. A channel created to coordinate a project can become a community. A community can become an affinity group. An affinity group can become a clique.

People begin speaking differently because they’re among “their people.” Language becomes more casual. Criticism becomes sharper. Assumptions about colleagues go unchallenged because those colleagues aren’t in the channel. Someone shares information that probably shouldn’t have traveled quite that far. A quick reaction provides instant validation. The windshield has appeared.

More importantly, small groups can begin developing their own version of organizational reality and continuously reinforce it among themselves. We can have more communication taking place than ever before while simultaneously having less shared understanding.

Silence Isn’t Consensus

Now add another powerful human tendency: our desire to avoid confrontation. Most people don’t want to be the person who disrupts a meeting, challenges a colleague publicly or tells an enthusiastic group that it may be heading in the wrong direction. Nobody wants to be the cause of disruption. So we remain silent. In a digital environment, silence is even easier. Don’t enter the thread. Don’t challenge the assertion. Add a thumbs-up and move on.

But silence can easily be mistaken for agreement.

Consensus isn’t the absence of objection. Sometimes it’s merely the presence of silence.

That’s why healthy companies need protocols, not merely good intentions. There must be understood moments when disagreement is expected rather than punished. Someone should be responsible for asking what hasn’t been considered. Leaders need to distinguish between a decision that has actually been made and momentum that has simply accumulated.

It’s not enough to give people the right to challenge. In the right circumstances, people need an obligation to challenge. That’s especially true when they possess information the rest of the group doesn’t have or believe a decision is moving away from the company’s interests.

Who Is Actually in Command?

The answer isn’t to ban Slack. That would be like concluding the Navy should have abandoned satellite communications because they complicated command and control. Better communications are enormously valuable. Slack can flatten unnecessary hierarchy, connect expertise across departments and geography, give junior people access to conversations they previously wouldn’t have heard and allow a good idea to travel faster than the org chart might otherwise permit.

But every communications technology changes the organization using it. These are the leadership questions worth examining.

• Who talks to whom all day?
• Where does information travel?
• Which informal groups have developed?
• Where are reputations being created or diminished?
• Who can move a group despite having little formal authority?
• When an important decision reaches the leadership table, how much of it has already been shaped somewhere else?

Perhaps most importantly, would people communicate the same way if everyone they were talking about were standing in the room?

Years ago, when chat first appeared aboard ships, we had to reconsider how command should be exercised because technology had changed what was possible. Corporate leaders face a version of that question today.

Slack didn’t invent informal power, cliques, gossip, groupthink or our reluctance to confront one another. It simply made all of them faster, easier and less visible. The org chart still shows who’s in charge. Leaders might want to understand whether their communications architecture agrees.