Every team needs a chat tool – but it’s not easy to know who should be looped into different conversations, or how open team communication should be. We all know the feeling of being inundated with messages in shared channels, and we’ve also been that person left out of a decision that happened in direct messages. So today, we’re debating the merits and pitfalls of open channel communication. 

Debater Kelvin Yap argues in defense of open channel communication, supported by Matt Abrahams, a strategic communications expert and host of the podcast “Think Fast, Talk Smart”, who shares what we miss when we opt for DMs. Eli Mishkin argues against the distraction from open channels, with the expertise of former technology executive Linda Stone who coined the term “continuous partial attention”.