When Stewart Butterfield looks back on building Slack, he doesn't hesitate to acknowledge something that most of the rest of us are loath to admit: There's been embarrassment as a powerful motivator at work on his teams — and out of control, it led employees to paper the office instead of addressing real problems. Butterfield brought up the issue years ago, describing an early Slack iteration as "just terrible" and telling his team they should "be humiliated that we offer this to the public."
This prompted an unusual phenomenon at the workplace, Butterfield said: His coworkers printed that quote on 40 sheets of paper, posted it around his office, and turned it into a type of motivational meme. "I walked in the next day to the office, and people had printed … that quote out and pasted it up on the wall," he told an interviewer. "That was kind of like: you're supposed to be ashamed of that. It should be a continual aspiration to do better." Publicly reminding themselves and everyone else that the product failed led to action, but at a cost: turning shame into public signposts instead of actual change.
Butterfield argues that embarrassment, when used wisely, can be a tool for growth. Drawing on ideas from Toyota's kaizen (constant improvement) philosophy and Ray Dalio's view that mistakes are just "small puzzles," he argues that openly admitting a flaw helps teams internalize the message that "we're definitely not finished yet." It's given out by his nonprofit arm, but not everything in tech culture flies under the radar like an owl with a dead mouse in its beak; even if it does, and I feel as though the industry is moving at warp speed till we're all slurring through scenes like "The Matrix" when Neo enters bullet time or TV hosts are clowns leading children to other clowns who touch them there for candy until they're old enough to join the rest of us in life-long medicine-ball boot camps — well, culture moves faster than ever before (a line that might type itself also based on how many times it has been written) yet therein lies silly little code bunny Stewart Butterfield's hope.
But he is clear on the caveats. Some people also react badly when they're called out for being in the wrong. Then, when embarrassment morphs into performance pressure that's devoid of structure or support, teams can fall back on cosmetic changes — what Butterfield calls "papering the office." It's not status updates or knowledge inputs; it's that which stands in the way of this sort of cohesive working. So it is an illusion rather than an actual remedy that objects like screenshots of bug reports, lists of action items filed away on a desk, or posters about imperfection (instead of how to fix perfection) represent. The danger: Momentum slows, and the incentives become theater.
The trick, Butterfield says, is to combine that candid feedback with context and capability. If you tell a team it should be ashamed and then don't open the door to change, you create moral injury, not momentum. In his opinion, leaders must ask questions like these: Are we building an environment that makes it safe to admit when things have gone wrong and then make decisions to improve them? Or are we just sending a signal of discontent and hoping for self-correction?
It was this attitude that helped to define the early Slack company. Butterfield's raw comments certainly got his team fired up — but they also planted a culture of accountability and urgency. Slack would become one of the most popular platforms for workplace communication and was ultimately acquired by Salesforce for $27.7 billion. But as Butterfield muses, success wasn't just about embarrassment— it was about funneling that shame into something analyzable, Improvable.
In a world of performance reviews, self-help, and relentless corporate positivity, Butterfield's perspective provides an understated lesson that might seem counterintuitive: sometimes the discomfort you can't bear is the sign you most need to change. But only if you're prepared to get beyond headlines and posters, and into on-the-ground action.
Hate can be a powerful force, as long as it doesn't become your team wallpaper.
