| They aren't. When I know who I'm talking to, I can tailor my message for them. If I talk to another embedded C++ coder about memory management, I can make my request short and concise by assuming that the recipient already knows what the placement new operator is, how it works, and what using it implies. That means I send a quick 10s chat message to ask for one thing. If I had to include all that background information to make the discussion accessible to people who have different strengths, for example to the front-end Ruby developers, then my 10s one-liner would likely turn into a 30 minute 2 pages email. But the contained information for my target recipient is still the same. So I have just wasted my time and his/her time. Also, there's the increasing issue of people taking internal work discussions and sharing them publicly. I wouldn't want some of the new hires in the social media team to read our internal discussions about CLV and CAQ, because discussing clients in a purely financial and/or mathematical way would rub more emotionally skilled people the wrong way. There was a huge scandal when word got out that some companies called their Dallas office the "discount" location, even though it had been blatantly obvious to everyone before that SF employees earned much more. So the simple act of sharing a chat message to a wider audience requires: 1. additional explanations, thereby making things longer and slower 2. additional safety checks, thereby making things slower |
Start the discussion at the level you want, make it clear who it’s for, and others can read along if they want. They may learn something, they may ask a question or two (and it’s good to answer for knowledge sharing), but also they may decide they don’t need to understand and not bother asking, and you can encourage this subtly if you get too many questions.
It’s also great for reducing comms later as rather than explain a decision or design or something later to each person who asks you can just point them at the original discussion.