Strong words. I wonder if the author has PTSD from poorly managed teams and has never had the fortune to work in a high performance well managed collaborative environment. I agree these are rare compared to the other kind, but they exist. Groups of people can produce more than lone wolves. One person didn't build the pyramids, the Linux kernel, or Amazon Web services. Even when responsibility for a top level domain rests with a single person, you still have to coordinate the work of people building the individual components.
One of the features of my work, these days, is that I work alone. I worked in [pretty high-functioning] teams, for most of my career.
Teams are how you do big stuff. I’m really good at what I do, but I’ve been forced to reduce my scope, working alone. I do much smaller projects, than our team used to do.
But the killer in teams, is communication overhead, and much of that, is imposed by management, trying to get visibility. If the team is good, they often communicate fine, internally.
Most of the examples he gave, are tools of management, seeking visibility.
But it’s also vital for management to have visibility. A team can’t just be a “black box,” but a really good team can have a lot of autonomy and agency.
You need good teams, and good managers. If you don’t have both, it’s likely to be less-than-optimal.
It's a provocative title, but I think this section better captures his scope of argument - "Collaboration-as-ideology has made ownership and responsibility feel antisocial, which is a hell of a thing, given that ownership is the only mechanism that gets anything across the finish line.", as well as "But there’s a huge difference between communication and collaboration as infrastructure to support individual, high-agency ownership, and communication and collaboration as the primary activity of an organisation".
I think the author has identified that most organizations both fail at effective collaboration, and also use collaboration to paper over their failures.
I think the author maybe over-corrects by leaning on the idea that "only small teams actually get stuff done", and honestly I don't think anyone should be using SLA Marshall/Men Against Fire as an analogy for like... office work (if nothing else, even if you take his words at face value, then the percentage of US infantry who fired their rifles went up from 15-25% in WW2 to ~50% in Korea due to training improvements), but I can get behind the idea that a lot of organizations are setup to diffuse responsibility.
I also do think it's interesting to think about building the Pyramids. For the vast majority of people involved... I don't think modern audiences would call their work relationship or style "collaborative". Usually we use "collaborative" in opposition (at different times) to "working alone", "working with strict boundaries", and "being highly directed in what to do". Being on a work gang, or even being a team foreman is very much "no working alone", but those were also likely highly directed jobs (you must bring this specific stone to this specific location by this time) with strict boundaries.
Agreed. I came in the comments to say something similar. I think the author raises some interesting points worth consideration but their perspective is so incredibly cynical. He mentioned a small team that made the Apollo computer program. Well it took an awful lot more than a computer program to get to the moon. I don’t think anybody would argue that there are people who don’t pull their weight out there but there is so much evidence that people working together actually works that it makes you wonder who hurt the author so much.
I can't say anything about how the Pyramids or AWS was build. But the Linux Kernels maintainence is full of responsibilities assigned to individual people.
> Groups of people can produce more than lone wolves.
It's not a linear scale. A lone wolf can't produce the latest Assassin's Creed game. A committee can't produce Stardew Valley or Balatro. They're different capabilities, not a simple matter of more/less.
What I see - and have seen since I started doing this 30+ years ago - is that the date is _always_ more important than the actual deliverable. Always. Meeting "the date" is the only thing that's tracked (but it also never happens). It's even justified through vague analogies like Joel Spolsky's admonition that "you wouldn't buy a pair of jeans without knowing how much they cost" without ever doing a slightly deeper dive into how developing software is different than selling a pair of jeans.
All of the collaboration artifice that the author is referring to seems to me to always be a futile attempt to meet "the date". That software development might itself be _inherently_ unpredictable is never even considered, even though there are a lot of reasons to suggest that it is: by definition, the software you're developing has never been developed before, or else you could just use the thing that already exists.
I had a glimmer of hope in the late 90's when the agile manifesto was published - everything about it seemed to me to read "software development activities can't be coordinated like a wedding banquet can, but you can at least make sure that everything is tracking toward a shared understanding". I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when "Agile" became "tell me exactly what you're going to do and how long each step will take" almost the instant of its inception.
I think the Author might have a lot of bad collaboration experience from working with teams that have low level of competence and agency, and especially in corporate, this highlights and accidentally resonates with me ( as of few months ago)
Laid off from a startup and moved fo corpos did gave me perspective,the first year working with the team works really well, we managed to get a lot of stuff really done and business were very happy.
And there came the Agile Coaches telling us to "Collaborate" while disguising as a need to serve his own agenda ( as he's also a PO for another squad ). So workshops on Collaboration, Explicit Expectation on PM have all authority and controls PO, for 8 freaking months just to get a competent team to work with a junior team with no agency nor even willingness to be mentored or do anything. So somewhat this incidentally aligns perfectly.
Corporate always manage to hire incompetent people, not firing them, and let others over-compensate for their failures, so yeah, its not really obvious but its there.
I believe the good collaboration can happen, but when people actually go of their ego and start listening and actually doing the work.
It's frustrating to pull more weight and take ownership when other people aren't. But what's legitimately soul-killing to an individual and deadly to an organization is the collective impulse to avoid giving those people credit when it's due. Most of those 20% out there pulling more than their weight just want some acknowledgement. Not giving them that is one way to quickly hollow out your company.
This quote and the entire article could be extrapolated beyond the scope of an organization to highlight the importance of the notion of authorship in society as a whole:
> The collaboration industry has spent a fortune obscuring a dirty truth: most complex, high-quality work is done by individuals or very small groups operating with clear authority and sharp accountability, then rationalized into the language of teamwork afterward. Dostoevsky wrote _The Brothers Karamazov_ alone. The Apollo Guidance Computer came from a team at MIT small enough to have real ownership, hierarchical enough that Margaret Hamilton's name could go on the error-detection routines she personally designed.
Contrast this with the claims of “democratizing knowledge” and the image of a utopia where everyone contributes original work into a black box and expects no credit and no compensation in return (in fact, happily paying for the privilege of using it).
We, humans, like to have created something worthy of kudos. We pull the rope less hard when it’s a collective effort than when the rope is just yours alone.
I was skeptical about the claim that 80% of soldiers refuse to fire their weapons, so I did a little reading and it seems like the original source has been pretty much debunked. This 2011 article sums it up: https://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol20/iss4/4/ but it's been doubted for decades.
A lot leaps from riflemen, who obviously didn’t want to die (did you expect them to rush Medal of Honor style?), to system features to model office work? Whole essay is incoherent mess written by one of those lonesome “no-bullshiter” who gets the job done but is so pulled down by modern day bureaucracy that even his clairvoyance can’t get through.
> Dostoevsky wrote _The Brothers Karamazov_ alone. The Apollo Guidance Computer came from a team at MIT small enough to have real ownership, hierarchical enough that Margaret Hamilton's name could go on the error-detection routines she personally designed
I have good news for you, my jaded friend! What is similar between those people and you? You’re an individual! Therefore you could write another masterpiece yourself, you can be next Notch, next copyparty guy, next Stardew Valley guy and a long list of creations created by an actuallly high-performing individual, not some complainer who is oh so encumbered by stupid social dancing.
It's interesting that the author does not even consider the impact of incentives on performance. As Charlie Munger famously said, "Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the outcomes." It is true that collaboration becomes increasingly difficult as the team grows in size, but collaboration is not the fundamental problem. To manage a large team, the real challenge is to design incentives that properly reward those who produce and perform, and penalize those who don't. People respond to incentives (yes, it is a tautology, and that is precisely the point).
It is true that on an individual level you get more work done if you collaborate less. But very often you will have solved the wrong problem. Collaboration often prevents that from happening because different point of views will make that clear before trying to solve a problem.
> Every project now seems to carry more coordination overhead than execution time, and when it fails the postmortem just recommends more collaboration...
Or it gets stuck in code review cause one colleague likes nitpicking everything endlessly, so you’re stuck changing working code for multiple days.
Or they have questions and want to spend 2-4 hours in a meeting about design and how to do development “better”, bonus points for not writing anything down for future reference, them expecting you’ll keep a bunch of rules in mind. No ADRs, no getting started guides, no docs about how to do deliveries, probably not even a proper README.md, or versioned run profiles or basic instructions on how to get a local DB working (worst case, everyone uses the same shared instance).
Even more points for not even having retrospectives and never looking at stuff critically - why people keep creating layers upon layers of abstractions and don’t care about the ideas behind YAGNI/KISS. More so, no actual tooling to check things (e.g. code style, but also tools to check architectural stuff, and also obviously no codegen to deal with the overly abstracted bs).
It all depends on the project and team a lot. Some people have only had the fortune to work in locales and environments where stuff like that isn’t commonplace but rest assured, it can get BAD out there.
Working in a good team can be better than working alone, sure!
But working in a bad team is certainly worse than working alone.
Especially so when seniority is measured in years or nepotism and you’re told to not rock the boat and shut up cause “we’ve always done things this way”. I'm exaggerating a bit here, but I’m certain that plenty of people work in conditions not far removed from that.
> ...every unilateral decision gets read as a cultural violation and a signal that you aren’t a team player. Collaboration-as-ideology has made ownership and responsibility feel antisocial, which is a hell of a thing, given that ownership is the only mechanism that gets anything across the finish line.
This is definitely how it can feel sometimes, but it's simply not true. The problem really is just poor communication and big knowledge gaps.
I do understand that not all workplaces allow for enough discussion. Arrogant behavior from leadership is just them cracking under the pressure. You should know that you're never the only one noticing it.
Don't get dragged down with them. You can voice your concerns candidly with the right people who care the most about the outcomes and let the chips fall where they may, or you can suffer in silence like they expect you to. It's sad that this is the expectation because these conversations are just as much a part of "collaboration" as anything else. I expect there may be some defensive replies from certain types of people who feel threatened by this idea.
What you should never do is let this stuff get under your skin or take it personally. The fact of the matter is, teamwork is the nature of any business. When people go rogue, it only makes the problems worse. Everyone misses out on opportunities to grow and the project suffers from the lack of coordination to continue long term.
This article is so true. "Collaboration" is how nothing ever gets done; we have this expression: "designed by committee"; we should also have "made by collaboration".
What's depressing is that it's like Fred Books' book never happened: most managers think the way to solve IT problems is just to trow more people / more money at it until it gets solved; and they're all surprised when it doesn't work, but try again the next time anyhow.
The problem isn't "collaboration", the problem is people who don't really know what "collaboration" really means. Status reports, standups, committees, meetings with a large number of people, etc, does not make "collaboration" happen.
Collaboration isn't a process or a management technique -- it is a communication style. If you want collaboration, you can't take random people and use process to "make them collaborate" -- you need to build your team out of people who are collaborators.
Furthermore, collaboration is not at odds with accountability. Most of the highest performing collaborative teams I've ever worked on have people who are each individually highly accountable for their own contributions, and that's a critical part of what makes them a valuable collaborator.
Sure. I trust people follow this to its logical end, which is how bad our mental model of "work" is. The more I think about it, this may get to the heart of all of our (bad) economic theory. Which is that, in a simple survival sense, there is no requirement whatsoever that "everybody works," or even contributes, but to have a functioning society, we do whatever it is we're doing now.
Something like UBI with extra steps.
And perhaps the bigger issue to get over, there perhaps ought not be a moral component to this, in a world where technology + a small number of people can easily take care of ALL actual needs.
I have a coworker that will take projects out from under you and do all the work themselves if you ask to collaborate with them. It happened twice, one of them he out right took all the credit and handed me peanuts. The person knows this so they try to keep you involved by having you review their work, which is usually pointless because they’ve already done all the work and there are no alternatives or caveats to consider. I will never work with them again even though they do good work and are sharp, purely because they’re a control freak and it slows everyone down.
A tip for the author, if they're here: those big flashing cursors at the top and bottom of the page make it exceedingly difficult for some of us to read the nearby text. Human eyes have evolved to follow the flashiest thing around, so are continually pulled towards those flashes while trying to read. Mine struggle badly with the top and bottom sections, where those cursors are in frame, to the extent that i can't be bothered to do so.
> But there’s a huge difference between communication and collaboration as infrastructure to support individual, high-agency ownership, and communication and collaboration as the primary activity of an organisation.
that is a meaningless buzzword salad masquerading as a deep insight
A lot of process and management is about dealing with low performers - by which I don’t mean incompetent people but people lacking motivation, or with the wrong intuitions, etc. Our hiring process can’t reliably filter out low performers, and when they get in it’s difficult to fire them, so we invent ways to raise the bottom line through processes.
And FWIW I don’t think you can solve this by always hiring the “best” either, at least not beyond a certain team size.
Perhaps, but during the initial design stages it is the core job function to figure out how to improve the current workflow quality.
If folks don't clearly define the finish line, than a project will run out of budget eventually as scope creep turns it back into the same useless mess.
Proper restructuring usually means firing people that do not recognize they are in a business setting. The Big Brain fallacy is a common bias with people too blind to recognize what other professions bring to the table, and ultimately are unproductive in a large project.
Every manager should read Moneyball before building operational teams with HR, and avoid the trap of the costly Big Brain =3
"Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game" (2003, Michael Lewis)
What it misses is that the 80% of soldiers who were not firing was still required. Not everyone has the same product, and someone’s product exists at an abstraction layer above the outcome and towards the organisation that builds it, as ugly and inefficient as it may be judged in comparison to an army of perfect contributors that does not exist.
I didn’t get anything out of Mythical Man Month, which I didn’t expect to anyway since it’s a management book. But for whatever reason it’s talked about as if it is a classic here. In part I think because it promotes the idea of the ten-x-er and how teams ought to be organized around supporting the ten-x-er.
I think most people that work at a big company will always "collaborate" i.e. "collude" subconsciously because the more people working on something, the less personal risk everyone has if something goes wrong. Unless there is intentional intervention to stop it, it's a natural effect of large, bloated organizations. More people means collective upside if it succeeds, and minimized downside if it fails.
And especially "managers" who do zero work will glob onto any project they can and pedantically watch over your shoulder to make it seem like they're doing anything.
As someone who is being actively "encouraged" to be more collaborative with a few non technical political type managers merely for the appearance of it, this rings true. Collaboration is great if you don't have a clue and can coast on someone's coattails.
Anyone who has worked in any large organisation knows exactly what I’m talking about.
My current employment is the first time I haven’t see this, the Pareto Principle.
The reason for this in biology is two fold:
1. Growth is distributed evenly as necessary to fill the containing system whether it is employment numbers or peas in a pod.
2. Resources are distributed to where they are demanded. Higher productivity individuals will consume a disproportionate number of tasks to complete as well as available resources. This difference is often statistically insignificant as a base difference but after compounding 20% of individuals account for 80% outputs and inputs.
Human behavior accounts for the same compounding because numerically growth distinction is similar enough.
Thought-provoking essay. I can see how responsibility and ownership are important to help identify, motivate and reward the high achievers (and conversely, identify and get rid of the "dead wood"). But I can also see how collaboration and the dilution of responsibility and ownership helps better integrate junior members who might otherwise stay on the sidelines for longer than they should. There's also the issue of personnel turnover: what happens if the one person who is responsible for a major piece of a project leaves the company? A collaborative setting is more resilient to churn. There are trade-offs, and possibly a middle ground to be found.
I think the author is overfitting. Collaboration and ownership are actually not in tension. _Bad process_ and ownership definitely can be. You can still have a high performance, high accountability culture that is collaborative.
Individual responsibility can just become a blame culture. I remember sitting near a team that worked like this - meetings with everyone trying to prove that some screw-up was actually due to someone else.
In such scenarios nobody wants to stick their neck out at all, everyone hates everyone else.
At a higher level the usual problem is with incentives being different from one team to another. If you want something done you have to start with the incentives rather than expect people to work against them and there does have to be leadership to break deadlocks.
> The pattern recurs because it describes something real about how effort is distributed inside groups, where a fraction of the people do most of the work, and the rest provide what you might ~charitably call “structural support.”
And LLMs is about to make sure that the structural support people are 99% of the team and the people who do most of the work are 1%, orchestrating a team of agents...
If this article is true, then a single talented person with a good workflow* for operationalizing a bunch of AI agents/pipelines should be able to get a lot of things done. Way more than before.
* I believe these workflows aren't entirely invented yet; it currently seems to be mostly token-burning with the illusion of productivity, measuring inputs rather than outputs.
> The average knowledge worker maintains accounts across system after system, switching between applications hundreds of times per day. And they produce, in aggregate, a staggering amount of coordinated and collaborative activity that never actually becomes anything resembling ~output.
The problem with this is conflating *output* for *impact*. A team of lone wolves writing 1k LOC by the hour is good output but not necessarily good impact.
A team with higher coordination overhead and "structural support" will probably have lower output, but if it focuses on significantly higher leverage activities might just have a better impact. The key question is whether that impact is visible and understood (often not) and lots of businesses are bad at understanding leverage.
I see this lone wolf BS from lots of founder types who mistake their own grind for real performance, often missing their own blind spots. I don't disagree that the 80-20% rule comes up and that some people have an outsized contribution overall compared to others, but to say that collaboration is dead as a result is throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Extremely good example of this is the fact that all major breakthroughs that pushed out civilisation further were done by highly motivated an genious individuals.
Im not saying teamwork is not needed, but it for sure should not be #1 indicator for teams.
Vetting for character to skip dycks is till fine in my eyes.
The lead story was about the “useless” soldiers in a battle that was won. I think as a minimum effort one should look for an example where the battle was lost? Most companies can only wish their outcomes were as good as the US in World War II.
Aren't many successful projects managed by a 'benevolent dictator'. That used to be a big deal around the Valley. Now everything is team work and collaboration.
The reason you want to enforce a culture of collaboration is because that’s how you bubble up the smart people. The alternative is gatekeeping and cronyism.
187 comments
Teams are how you do big stuff. I’m really good at what I do, but I’ve been forced to reduce my scope, working alone. I do much smaller projects, than our team used to do.
But the killer in teams, is communication overhead, and much of that, is imposed by management, trying to get visibility. If the team is good, they often communicate fine, internally.
Most of the examples he gave, are tools of management, seeking visibility.
But it’s also vital for management to have visibility. A team can’t just be a “black box,” but a really good team can have a lot of autonomy and agency.
You need good teams, and good managers. If you don’t have both, it’s likely to be less-than-optimal.
I think the author has identified that most organizations both fail at effective collaboration, and also use collaboration to paper over their failures.
I think the author maybe over-corrects by leaning on the idea that "only small teams actually get stuff done", and honestly I don't think anyone should be using SLA Marshall/Men Against Fire as an analogy for like... office work (if nothing else, even if you take his words at face value, then the percentage of US infantry who fired their rifles went up from 15-25% in WW2 to ~50% in Korea due to training improvements), but I can get behind the idea that a lot of organizations are setup to diffuse responsibility.
I also do think it's interesting to think about building the Pyramids. For the vast majority of people involved... I don't think modern audiences would call their work relationship or style "collaborative". Usually we use "collaborative" in opposition (at different times) to "working alone", "working with strict boundaries", and "being highly directed in what to do". Being on a work gang, or even being a team foreman is very much "no working alone", but those were also likely highly directed jobs (you must bring this specific stone to this specific location by this time) with strict boundaries.
> Groups of people can produce more than lone wolves.
It's not a linear scale. A lone wolf can't produce the latest Assassin's Creed game. A committee can't produce Stardew Valley or Balatro. They're different capabilities, not a simple matter of more/less.
All of the collaboration artifice that the author is referring to seems to me to always be a futile attempt to meet "the date". That software development might itself be _inherently_ unpredictable is never even considered, even though there are a lot of reasons to suggest that it is: by definition, the software you're developing has never been developed before, or else you could just use the thing that already exists.
I had a glimmer of hope in the late 90's when the agile manifesto was published - everything about it seemed to me to read "software development activities can't be coordinated like a wedding banquet can, but you can at least make sure that everything is tracking toward a shared understanding". I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when "Agile" became "tell me exactly what you're going to do and how long each step will take" almost the instant of its inception.
Laid off from a startup and moved fo corpos did gave me perspective,the first year working with the team works really well, we managed to get a lot of stuff really done and business were very happy.
And there came the Agile Coaches telling us to "Collaborate" while disguising as a need to serve his own agenda ( as he's also a PO for another squad ). So workshops on Collaboration, Explicit Expectation on PM have all authority and controls PO, for 8 freaking months just to get a competent team to work with a junior team with no agency nor even willingness to be mentored or do anything. So somewhat this incidentally aligns perfectly.
Corporate always manage to hire incompetent people, not firing them, and let others over-compensate for their failures, so yeah, its not really obvious but its there.
I believe the good collaboration can happen, but when people actually go of their ego and start listening and actually doing the work.
> The collaboration industry has spent a fortune obscuring a dirty truth: most complex, high-quality work is done by individuals or very small groups operating with clear authority and sharp accountability, then rationalized into the language of teamwork afterward. Dostoevsky wrote _The Brothers Karamazov_ alone. The Apollo Guidance Computer came from a team at MIT small enough to have real ownership, hierarchical enough that Margaret Hamilton's name could go on the error-detection routines she personally designed.
Contrast this with the claims of “democratizing knowledge” and the image of a utopia where everyone contributes original work into a black box and expects no credit and no compensation in return (in fact, happily paying for the privilege of using it).
We, humans, like to have created something worthy of kudos. We pull the rope less hard when it’s a collective effort than when the rope is just yours alone.
> Dostoevsky wrote _The Brothers Karamazov_ alone. The Apollo Guidance Computer came from a team at MIT small enough to have real ownership, hierarchical enough that Margaret Hamilton's name could go on the error-detection routines she personally designed
I have good news for you, my jaded friend! What is similar between those people and you? You’re an individual! Therefore you could write another masterpiece yourself, you can be next Notch, next copyparty guy, next Stardew Valley guy and a long list of creations created by an actuallly high-performing individual, not some complainer who is oh so encumbered by stupid social dancing.
In short, he proved that even AI agents exhibit all the dysfunctions one would normally attribute to human shortcomings / politics / laziness etc.
Either way, I think the point is strong: if the organization is bad, you end up doing mostly work about work which is exhausting.
Small, effective teams with super high accountability are more fun, but don't look "reproducible" or "repeatable".
Shameless plug on my take: https://www.menge.io/blog/where-to-cut/
> Every project now seems to carry more coordination overhead than execution time, and when it fails the postmortem just recommends more collaboration...
Or it gets stuck in code review cause one colleague likes nitpicking everything endlessly, so you’re stuck changing working code for multiple days.
Or they have questions and want to spend 2-4 hours in a meeting about design and how to do development “better”, bonus points for not writing anything down for future reference, them expecting you’ll keep a bunch of rules in mind. No ADRs, no getting started guides, no docs about how to do deliveries, probably not even a proper README.md, or versioned run profiles or basic instructions on how to get a local DB working (worst case, everyone uses the same shared instance).
Even more points for not even having retrospectives and never looking at stuff critically - why people keep creating layers upon layers of abstractions and don’t care about the ideas behind YAGNI/KISS. More so, no actual tooling to check things (e.g. code style, but also tools to check architectural stuff, and also obviously no codegen to deal with the overly abstracted bs).
It all depends on the project and team a lot. Some people have only had the fortune to work in locales and environments where stuff like that isn’t commonplace but rest assured, it can get BAD out there.
Working in a good team can be better than working alone, sure!
But working in a bad team is certainly worse than working alone.
Especially so when seniority is measured in years or nepotism and you’re told to not rock the boat and shut up cause “we’ve always done things this way”. I'm exaggerating a bit here, but I’m certain that plenty of people work in conditions not far removed from that.
> ...every unilateral decision gets read as a cultural violation and a signal that you aren’t a team player. Collaboration-as-ideology has made ownership and responsibility feel antisocial, which is a hell of a thing, given that ownership is the only mechanism that gets anything across the finish line.
This is definitely how it can feel sometimes, but it's simply not true. The problem really is just poor communication and big knowledge gaps.
I do understand that not all workplaces allow for enough discussion. Arrogant behavior from leadership is just them cracking under the pressure. You should know that you're never the only one noticing it.
Don't get dragged down with them. You can voice your concerns candidly with the right people who care the most about the outcomes and let the chips fall where they may, or you can suffer in silence like they expect you to. It's sad that this is the expectation because these conversations are just as much a part of "collaboration" as anything else. I expect there may be some defensive replies from certain types of people who feel threatened by this idea.
What you should never do is let this stuff get under your skin or take it personally. The fact of the matter is, teamwork is the nature of any business. When people go rogue, it only makes the problems worse. Everyone misses out on opportunities to grow and the project suffers from the lack of coordination to continue long term.
What's depressing is that it's like Fred Books' book never happened: most managers think the way to solve IT problems is just to trow more people / more money at it until it gets solved; and they're all surprised when it doesn't work, but try again the next time anyhow.
Collaboration isn't a process or a management technique -- it is a communication style. If you want collaboration, you can't take random people and use process to "make them collaborate" -- you need to build your team out of people who are collaborators.
Furthermore, collaboration is not at odds with accountability. Most of the highest performing collaborative teams I've ever worked on have people who are each individually highly accountable for their own contributions, and that's a critical part of what makes them a valuable collaborator.
Something like UBI with extra steps.
And perhaps the bigger issue to get over, there perhaps ought not be a moral component to this, in a world where technology + a small number of people can easily take care of ALL actual needs.
> But there’s a huge difference between communication and collaboration as infrastructure to support individual, high-agency ownership, and communication and collaboration as the primary activity of an organisation.
that is a meaningless buzzword salad masquerading as a deep insight
Collaboration sucks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45892394 - Nov 2025 (248 comments)
And FWIW I don’t think you can solve this by always hiring the “best” either, at least not beyond a certain team size.
If folks don't clearly define the finish line, than a project will run out of budget eventually as scope creep turns it back into the same useless mess.
Proper restructuring usually means firing people that do not recognize they are in a business setting. The Big Brain fallacy is a common bias with people too blind to recognize what other professions bring to the table, and ultimately are unproductive in a large project.
Every manager should read Moneyball before building operational teams with HR, and avoid the trap of the costly Big Brain =3
"Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game" (2003, Michael Lewis)
https://www.amazon.com/Moneyball-Art-Winning-Unfair-Game/dp/...
And especially "managers" who do zero work will glob onto any project they can and pedantically watch over your shoulder to make it seem like they're doing anything.
My current employment is the first time I haven’t see this, the Pareto Principle.
The reason for this in biology is two fold:
1. Growth is distributed evenly as necessary to fill the containing system whether it is employment numbers or peas in a pod.
2. Resources are distributed to where they are demanded. Higher productivity individuals will consume a disproportionate number of tasks to complete as well as available resources. This difference is often statistically insignificant as a base difference but after compounding 20% of individuals account for 80% outputs and inputs.
Human behavior accounts for the same compounding because numerically growth distinction is similar enough.
In such scenarios nobody wants to stick their neck out at all, everyone hates everyone else.
At a higher level the usual problem is with incentives being different from one team to another. If you want something done you have to start with the incentives rather than expect people to work against them and there does have to be leadership to break deadlocks.
> The pattern recurs because it describes something real about how effort is distributed inside groups, where a fraction of the people do most of the work, and the rest provide what you might ~charitably call “structural support.”
And LLMs is about to make sure that the structural support people are 99% of the team and the people who do most of the work are 1%, orchestrating a team of agents...
* I believe these workflows aren't entirely invented yet; it currently seems to be mostly token-burning with the illusion of productivity, measuring inputs rather than outputs.
> The average knowledge worker maintains accounts across system after system, switching between applications hundreds of times per day. And they produce, in aggregate, a staggering amount of coordinated and collaborative activity that never actually becomes anything resembling ~output.
The problem with this is conflating *output* for *impact*. A team of lone wolves writing 1k LOC by the hour is good output but not necessarily good impact.
A team with higher coordination overhead and "structural support" will probably have lower output, but if it focuses on significantly higher leverage activities might just have a better impact. The key question is whether that impact is visible and understood (often not) and lots of businesses are bad at understanding leverage.
I see this lone wolf BS from lots of founder types who mistake their own grind for real performance, often missing their own blind spots. I don't disagree that the 80-20% rule comes up and that some people have an outsized contribution overall compared to others, but to say that collaboration is dead as a result is throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Im not saying teamwork is not needed, but it for sure should not be #1 indicator for teams.
Vetting for character to skip dycks is till fine in my eyes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne...
Shoot rounds from your m16/ak47 all you want while sitting in a ditch — it’s mostly pointless