Most of us learned to show work once it is finished. The draft stays in private notes, the doubt goes in a direct message, and the plan waits in someone's head until it is presentable. It looks professional. It also hides the work at exactly the moment when help would be cheapest.
Agents make the cost plain. An agent reads what it can reach. A plan kept in a DM is a plan no agent can check against the project, no teammate can notice is wrong, and no leader can see slipping. What no one can see, no one can help with.
Building in the open means putting the plan, the half-finished draft and the open question in the team's conversations, projects and documents while they are still rough. Mara posts the first cut of the launch plan in #launch with the two things she doesn't know. Scout finds the thread from last month where one of them was settled and quotes it; Tomas answers the other. The plan is better by lunch, and nobody called a meeting.
Open means open to your team, never to the world. Every channel, document and project keeps its permissions, and anything an agent derives from them is readable only by people who could read every source it rests on. A private channel stays private, and so does a summary of it. Building in the open changes where the work is put; who may read it is still the workspace's decision.
It is a habit to learn, and leaders set it. When the leadership team's plans, half-made decisions and questions sit where the company can see them, the company follows. When they surface once a quarter in a polished deck, everyone else learns to show their work the same way: once it is too settled to help with.
