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).
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.
Strong agree. When I started managing there was very little oversight. It wasn’t perfect and we went a bit astray, and we also did phenomenal work and had everyone on the team deeply engaged and moving with autonomy.
On my second team, the visibility theater took over, upper management set and reset and reset and reset our direction, and nobody was happy. In retrospect, I should have said no immediately. Trusting and empowering your people is hard to beat.
Communication overhead is a quadratic function. In teams with n people it takes n^2 time to keep everyone informed.
That's why the most effective teams are wolf packs - roughly 6-10 highly performant members where communication overhead is still low enough that it barely matters, but have enough people to be way more productive than an individual.
Obviously there's a minimum level of competence you need to have for this to work. The smaller the team the less freeloaders are tolerated.
> 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.
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.
Yeah, I think the author strays a bit away from the title.
The author says, "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" which means collaboration can work... in the right environment and with the right people. I work in R&D and I could not imagine not working in a collaborative environment. It's not reasonable to have expertise at everything and it's understood that things have to get done no matter whose name is on the ticket/story.
I also agree on you calling out Men against Fire example as well. That's not a collaboration issue, that's a training issue (amongst other things). And that problem went away as you said.
> By 1946, the US Army had accepted Marshall’s conclusions, and the Human Resources Research Office of the US Army subsequently pioneered a revolution in combat training which eventually replaced firing at ‘bulls eye’ targets with deeply ingrained ‘conditioning’ using realistic, man-shaped ‘pop-up’ targets that fall when hit. Psychologists know that this kind of powerful ‘operant conditioning’ is the only technique which will reliably influence the primitive, mid-brain processing of a frightened human being. Fire drills condition terrified school children to respond properly during a fire. Conditioning in flight simulators enables frightened pilots to respond reflexively to emergency situations. And similar application and perfection of basic conditioning techniques increased the rate of fire to approximately 55 percent in Korea and around 95 percent in Vietnam.
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 fail to grasp the basis of folks knee-jerk dismissal of just about anything that strikes them as "cynical". Like, what world do you live in that cynicism isn't a signal of clear vision?
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.
At first, I also thought that rejecting collaboration excludes any kind of teamwork, but then I noticed the quotation marks - so they're apparently only rejecting quote-unquote-collaboration (as in "collaboration theatre": endless calls with no tangible outcome, wanting to involve everyone in decisions etc.), not actual collaboration (which is also consistent with what the article itself says).
Depends on the problem being solved. And how frequently the core prob changes. Cuz nothing is static in an ever changing universe.
What organization, skills, leadership is required to explore a jungle for gold is very different from what organization, skills and leadership is required to run a gold mine.
So we get explore-exploit tradeoffs, satisficing vs optimizing choices etc.
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.
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.
As per the article—it describes an ideal organization where everyone, too, works towards achieving a similar goal.
The crucial difference highlighted is whether it involves one feeling responsible and recognised for their work on a particular part (even if it is destined to integrate with other parts, not unlike how a given human would with the rest of society).
Collaboration between us is the default (no one exists in isolation), but forcing a particular sense of collaboration onto people is a different thing.
That seems more like independant collaboration. Someoje built something without getting 10 cook to taste the broth. If its good, then someone will identify it for its merits and then build on top of it
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.
I've never cared about this, actually. For me, the camaderie of the team is most important, and next comes the money. Acknowledgement from people who barely know what I do: I couldn't care less.
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.
I doubt whether Marshall was referring to soldiers in logitiscal roles when he made his claim about only 20-25% of soldiers firing their weapons, but I do wonder whether other people are getting confused by those numbers. About twenty years ago I looked up what the "tooth-to-tail" ratio was for various branches of the U.S. armed forces, and found anywhere from a 1:10 ratio for the army (10 soldiers in support roles not expected to see combat, v.s. 1 soldier on the front lines who would be expected to need to fire his weapon), to a 1:25 ratio for the air force (which had, naturally, a lot more support personnel, such as mechanics and so on, who would spend their whole military career in hangars or on bases and never actually flying a single plane). That's anywhere from 10% to just 4% of military personnel, depending on branch, who would be expected to fire at the enemy; the only time support personnel would be engaged in combat is if something had gone badly wrong militarily and their supply lines were being attacked.
So while the article you linked isn't confused on the subject, and I doubt Marshall was mixing support personnel in with front-line soldiers in his numbers, I do wonder whether there are people who confuse those two numbers: the number of soldiers, sailors, coasties, airmen, or marines who would never be in combat even during times of war, vs. the number who would actually be in combat and not fire.
(The article did address "what if the battle never came near where those particular soldiers were standing?", which was the other question I wondered about).
I agree. It seems impossible that its referring to support staff in those numbers. I had heard of similar studies in the British Army in ww1, with similar results (training on man-shaped targets etc) - surely the army would be unlikely to change tack based on a study with such an obviously flawed conclusion.
Not to mention the fact that this was a time of much more serious discipline issues. People were executed for desertion, and despite that many people did. There was also much malingering, up to and including literally shooting oneself in the foot. Is it so hard to believe that some people just hid when battles came?
Id be very surprised to hear from the other person that by Vietnam they had gotten it up to 95% though. My impression was that the most effective move away from this sort of thing was the move to a professional volunteer army, no conscription.
On Killing further develops the idea [0] by looking at a wider set of battles across time and, crucially, finds that by adapting training methods, the kill rate went up to beyond 90%. This then appears to come with higher rates PTSD.
> 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.
> 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
I think it's just explaining the difference between comms/collab being a supporting thing vs the only thing? It doesn't seem intended to be deep to me, but it's a little verbose.
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.
Right. But more often than not, the problem that's being solved is "we have gotten money to throw at things", so the answer of throwing in many more people to busywork kind of makes sense.
That's before we even think about all the consultants and similar roles where busywork really is work. Then all the organizational or agile roles.
The fact that some product gets shipped and we still have customers is good, because that's what pays for it all, but that is just the foundation we all rest on. Almost like background noise.
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.
> A lot leaps from riflemen, who obviously didn’t want to die
Yeah but you'd think not dying involves killing those who want to kill you, or at least shooting at them! Isn't it super interesting to learn that 80% of riflemen don't ever shoot?
a) other comment in the thread disproved the claim
b) even if it was remotely true, context matters. Refusing to shoot someone point blank because of reasons is one thing, refusing to go against Tiger 2 is another.
You seem to ignore all the mountains of evidence that sense of responsibility drops in groups. The larger the group, the bigger the drop. This is not news, or non-sense.
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.
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.
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.
Office lives matter! Do you know how much PTSD I have from waiting for my morning latte in our office coffeeshop while being late for standup? All of it!
Collaboration has structure. The structure is the result of "the activity to create and maintain a shared understanding of a problem in order to solve it" - which is a definition of collaboration. I don't think collaboration requires a hierarchy more than it requires a tool for groupwork.
Above N people it probably does. Except rare cases where it is embarssingly parallel focused mission. Hacker groups, searching for a missing person etc.
Can we start appreciating and respecting other people's professional experiences without dismissing and criticising them?
It's well written and brought to light a very interesting subject, e.g. "Marshall’s research showed that just 15-20% of riflemen in active combat positions ever fired their weapons".
It is interesting to pick on an example like the Battle of the Bulge. To put those men, on both sides, in the field was an enormous effort of collaboration. We can say it was doomed from the beginning, in hindsight, but it was very dangerous at the time and took enormous efforts to disengage troops and redeploy them. Patton's redeployment must be one of the greatest organisational feats in history.
At the beginning of the Battle the weather was terrible, stopping the normal collaboration with the air force. When the weather cleared, collaboration restarted, and both arms could work together much more effectively than the army alone.
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.
> ...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.
I think our processes are terrible as an industry. I have brought this up many times but we don't understand what actually works when something goes right and what failed when something went wrong. Adding to this is that engineers love tools and process so they tend to credit tools and process with success because we like the machine. Giving it credit where credit wasn't due leads to slowly growing more elaborate process and tools over time. This love of tools and process is a fundamental flaw in our culture and it is a big part of why big teams fail and small ones can get things done.
There are two fundamental truths to software, or any real organizational level problem. First, you don't know what the solution is until you have actually built it and are using it and second designing and building something is a non-polynomial growth problem.
The first part of the problem we sort of get, sometimes. The solution is iteration for the same reason it has always been. Assess, step, assess, step isn't just a good way to train a NN, it is also a great way to do pretty much anything where you don't know the optimal solution. Take the gradient of the situation and then take a right sized step in the right direction. Think you can have a perfect design before you start coding? You are basically saying you can take one big step from the start to the end. Either you have a small problem to solve or you are deluding yourself. Successful software is iterative. It always was and always will be. If your retrospective says things like 'if we had just done X from the start' be very careful because you are falling into the hindsight trap. You really couldn't have known X was the right thing. There is a reason you didn't see X. Just accept the iterative nature and own it. Try for appropriate step sizes, do good regular assessments, keep the iterations tight and you will probably be ok.
The second problem, NP growth, is where things really fall off the rails though. People get iterative, they see it work, even if they don't understand what they are really doing, but NP complexity growth is a real killer. The problem is that it actually IS true that if you took more time and put all the pieces together and solved it all as one problem you technically could eventually find the better solution. But more than likely the heat death of the universe will catch you before you do. Oh, yeah, and the total information storage needed to document the combinations tried will likely kill you too. There is only one good solution to NP growth, accept a local minimum and divide and conquer.
NP complexity growth is the foundational problem that needs to be attacked and the why things work or don't. Even more than iterative in many cases. As a problem grows its complexity, the possible number of solutions to check, grows in an NP way. The only solution is to drop the number of options to consider. You have to divide the problem and admit a local optimum is the best practical solution. People -sort of- get this by pretending to break the problem up and give it to different people or teams but then totally blow it. Jira is an example of totally blowing it. So you broke the problem down and you broke the teams into smaller pieces to address those sub problems but then you threw it all in one place again in Jira and you had all the teams in the same standup. You can't do that. That is the point of divide and conquer. You do that and you get lost because the problem just got too big again when you put all the pieces together. Also, communication scales up with people, even without problem size changing. Create too big of a team and the communication eats all the available work. Divide and conquer -requires- not communicating, or at least being exceptionally careful about how you communicate between problems.
The processes and tools we have created and love to use so much are the heart of why things don't work and we need to start admitting that. They give us a false sense that we can make a team bigger or take a bigger problem on. That is a mistake.
If you have done a good job of dividing a problem up, and correctly sized teams, then you have created problems that are clear enough not to need status boards and the like. Sure, go ahead and use them if your small team likes that. Be my guest, but you probably shouldn't. If a team is iterating on their problem and the problem is appropriately scoped then the team knows the state of their entire piece so well that the status boards slow them down. Why put in a jira ticket when you can just deal with it? Why break your internal team communications like that? Team management and project management become easy with small teams since your options are limited and the problem is small so it is all obvious. If you are saying to yourself 'well how will we know the whole thing is on track' well if you divided correctly then every level has a human sized understanding to deal with and is keeping track of their piece. That includes the team that owns teams. They should have designed the teams working for them, and the problems those teams are dealing with, in such a way that the working memory state is enough. They also designed the communication to that team in a way that they stay informed -without- joining that team and in doing so joining all teams. In other words they don't micro manage because that breaks divide and conquer. If any level is lost then the problem may not have been broken down well or has changed. A good iterative team catches this and raises the flag quickly so the divide can happen again if needed. The team leading the team has the job of monitoring to help figure this out, but monitoring in very limited ways so that they don't end up micro managing and collapsing the divisions.
A good military know this and a bad one has forgotten it. In WWII we had task forces for everything. They could stand up a TF, get it training so that it was a coherent entity, execute the mission needed and tear it apart. We were amazing at it. When WWII ended we did big things because we carried our understanding of the operational level of war, how to break apart problems and teams, into industry. We went to the moon. Now however we have standing task forces in the US military that are essentially the leftovers from WWII. We crate new task forces, badly, that are really just the existing ones renamed which means they have their old job and new job and nothing has really been broken out and isolated correctly. We suck at war and a big reason for this is that we have forgotten the operational level of war lessons from WWII.
This is a long rant to get to this final point. The author doesn't get the real reason why '20%' does the work. It is because we hire and create massive teams that can't get anything done because their communication has scaled to 1000% of their capacity. So, naturally, a small core team forms that can effectively communicate and get a job done, by ignoring he other 80%. It isn't the other 80%'s fault, it is the organizations fault for not breaking things up and creating small teams where the size of the problem is understandable and actionable and, most importantly, not re-merging the problem and the teams with stupid things like Jira boards.
The real solution is the same set of solutions that work time and time again. Create small teams. Give them clear problems to solve and the right tools and authority to solve them. Put bounds on what they should be doing so they, and you, don't get distracted. Understand that a problem is an evolving iterative thing and lean into that. If 80% of your workforce isn't doing things then your organization is broken. Start figuring out how to fix it. Collaboration isn't bullshit. It is fundamental. We just need to actually, intentionally, design that collaboration based on the actual things that shape it. NP growth and iterative understanding.
Article is a thought leadership style piece. By commenting on business you pedistal yourself and can charge for consultancy or even (as in this case) to read premium content. The thought leadership style is generally opinionated and matter of fact. They are, after all the expert.
The core issue is that collaboration bullshit is fantastic for mediocre people who cannot produce anything of value and as the team grows, the share of mediocre people will inevitably grow. This is why every single large organization turns into a theatre of processes.
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).
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.
Strong agree. When I started managing there was very little oversight. It wasn’t perfect and we went a bit astray, and we also did phenomenal work and had everyone on the team deeply engaged and moving with autonomy.
On my second team, the visibility theater took over, upper management set and reset and reset and reset our direction, and nobody was happy. In retrospect, I should have said no immediately. Trusting and empowering your people is hard to beat.
Communication overhead is a quadratic function. In teams with n people it takes n^2 time to keep everyone informed.
That's why the most effective teams are wolf packs - roughly 6-10 highly performant members where communication overhead is still low enough that it barely matters, but have enough people to be way more productive than an individual.
Obviously there's a minimum level of competence you need to have for this to work. The smaller the team the less freeloaders are tolerated.
> 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.
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.
Yeah, I think the author strays a bit away from the title.
The author says, "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" which means collaboration can work... in the right environment and with the right people. I work in R&D and I could not imagine not working in a collaborative environment. It's not reasonable to have expertise at everything and it's understood that things have to get done no matter whose name is on the ticket/story.
I also agree on you calling out Men against Fire example as well. That's not a collaboration issue, that's a training issue (amongst other things). And that problem went away as you said.
> By 1946, the US Army had accepted Marshall’s conclusions, and the Human Resources Research Office of the US Army subsequently pioneered a revolution in combat training which eventually replaced firing at ‘bulls eye’ targets with deeply ingrained ‘conditioning’ using realistic, man-shaped ‘pop-up’ targets that fall when hit. Psychologists know that this kind of powerful ‘operant conditioning’ is the only technique which will reliably influence the primitive, mid-brain processing of a frightened human being. Fire drills condition terrified school children to respond properly during a fire. Conditioning in flight simulators enables frightened pilots to respond reflexively to emergency situations. And similar application and perfection of basic conditioning techniques increased the rate of fire to approximately 55 percent in Korea and around 95 percent in Vietnam.
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 fail to grasp the basis of folks knee-jerk dismissal of just about anything that strikes them as "cynical". Like, what world do you live in that cynicism isn't a signal of clear vision?
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.
At first, I also thought that rejecting collaboration excludes any kind of teamwork, but then I noticed the quotation marks - so they're apparently only rejecting quote-unquote-collaboration (as in "collaboration theatre": endless calls with no tangible outcome, wanting to involve everyone in decisions etc.), not actual collaboration (which is also consistent with what the article itself says).
Depends on the problem being solved. And how frequently the core prob changes. Cuz nothing is static in an ever changing universe.
What organization, skills, leadership is required to explore a jungle for gold is very different from what organization, skills and leadership is required to run a gold mine.
So we get explore-exploit tradeoffs, satisficing vs optimizing choices etc.
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.
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.
But at the same time we all build things on top of other things and rely on complex supply chains. That's also a form of collaboration
As per the article—it describes an ideal organization where everyone, too, works towards achieving a similar goal. The crucial difference highlighted is whether it involves one feeling responsible and recognised for their work on a particular part (even if it is destined to integrate with other parts, not unlike how a given human would with the rest of society).
Collaboration between us is the default (no one exists in isolation), but forcing a particular sense of collaboration onto people is a different thing.
That seems more like independant collaboration. Someoje built something without getting 10 cook to taste the broth. If its good, then someone will identify it for its merits and then build on top of it
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.
I've never cared about this, actually. For me, the camaderie of the team is most important, and next comes the money. Acknowledgement from people who barely know what I do: I couldn't care less.
> But what's legitimately soul-killing to an individual
Yes.
> deadly to an organization is the collective impulse to avoid giving those people credit when it's due.
No, in fact most office jobs operate this way in the world.
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.
I doubt whether Marshall was referring to soldiers in logitiscal roles when he made his claim about only 20-25% of soldiers firing their weapons, but I do wonder whether other people are getting confused by those numbers. About twenty years ago I looked up what the "tooth-to-tail" ratio was for various branches of the U.S. armed forces, and found anywhere from a 1:10 ratio for the army (10 soldiers in support roles not expected to see combat, v.s. 1 soldier on the front lines who would be expected to need to fire his weapon), to a 1:25 ratio for the air force (which had, naturally, a lot more support personnel, such as mechanics and so on, who would spend their whole military career in hangars or on bases and never actually flying a single plane). That's anywhere from 10% to just 4% of military personnel, depending on branch, who would be expected to fire at the enemy; the only time support personnel would be engaged in combat is if something had gone badly wrong militarily and their supply lines were being attacked.
So while the article you linked isn't confused on the subject, and I doubt Marshall was mixing support personnel in with front-line soldiers in his numbers, I do wonder whether there are people who confuse those two numbers: the number of soldiers, sailors, coasties, airmen, or marines who would never be in combat even during times of war, vs. the number who would actually be in combat and not fire.
(The article did address "what if the battle never came near where those particular soldiers were standing?", which was the other question I wondered about).
I agree. It seems impossible that its referring to support staff in those numbers. I had heard of similar studies in the British Army in ww1, with similar results (training on man-shaped targets etc) - surely the army would be unlikely to change tack based on a study with such an obviously flawed conclusion.
Not to mention the fact that this was a time of much more serious discipline issues. People were executed for desertion, and despite that many people did. There was also much malingering, up to and including literally shooting oneself in the foot. Is it so hard to believe that some people just hid when battles came?
Id be very surprised to hear from the other person that by Vietnam they had gotten it up to 95% though. My impression was that the most effective move away from this sort of thing was the move to a professional volunteer army, no conscription.
On Killing further develops the idea [0] by looking at a wider set of battles across time and, crucially, finds that by adapting training methods, the kill rate went up to beyond 90%. This then appears to come with higher rates PTSD.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Killing
> 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.
> 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
I think it's just explaining the difference between comms/collab being a supporting thing vs the only thing? It doesn't seem intended to be deep to me, but it's a little verbose.
Yeah but I think you'd be hard pressed to find a company that thinks comms/collab are the only thing.
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.
Right. But more often than not, the problem that's being solved is "we have gotten money to throw at things", so the answer of throwing in many more people to busywork kind of makes sense.
That's before we even think about all the consultants and similar roles where busywork really is work. Then all the organizational or agile roles.
The fact that some product gets shipped and we still have customers is good, because that's what pays for it all, but that is just the foundation we all rest on. Almost like background noise.
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.
> A lot leaps from riflemen, who obviously didn’t want to die
Yeah but you'd think not dying involves killing those who want to kill you, or at least shooting at them! Isn't it super interesting to learn that 80% of riflemen don't ever shoot?
a) other comment in the thread disproved the claim
b) even if it was remotely true, context matters. Refusing to shoot someone point blank because of reasons is one thing, refusing to go against Tiger 2 is another.
You seem to ignore all the mountains of evidence that sense of responsibility drops in groups. The larger the group, the bigger the drop. This is not news, or non-sense.
Are you a C level at some company? If not, why do you care?
i work in teams and collaborate with my AI agents,
and i feel that it's a much better way to work.
whenever i need real users feedback, i just ask my wife next to me to test out the features and give end user feedbacks
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.
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.
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.
Not sure men fighting for their lives in WW2 is the best comparison point for dev teams having too many standups and retros.
Office lives matter! Do you know how much PTSD I have from waiting for my morning latte in our office coffeeshop while being late for standup? All of it!
https://www.vice.com/en/article/taliban-bureaucrats-hate-wor...
Apparently the Taliban find office work far worse than being fighters, so you never know!
Some may find this classic relevant:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne...
Collaboration has structure. The structure is the result of "the activity to create and maintain a shared understanding of a problem in order to solve it" - which is a definition of collaboration. I don't think collaboration requires a hierarchy more than it requires a tool for groupwork.
Above N people it probably does. Except rare cases where it is embarssingly parallel focused mission. Hacker groups, searching for a missing person etc.
Can we start appreciating and respecting other people's professional experiences without dismissing and criticising them?
It's well written and brought to light a very interesting subject, e.g. "Marshall’s research showed that just 15-20% of riflemen in active combat positions ever fired their weapons".
It is interesting to pick on an example like the Battle of the Bulge. To put those men, on both sides, in the field was an enormous effort of collaboration. We can say it was doomed from the beginning, in hindsight, but it was very dangerous at the time and took enormous efforts to disengage troops and redeploy them. Patton's redeployment must be one of the greatest organisational feats in history.
At the beginning of the Battle the weather was terrible, stopping the normal collaboration with the air force. When the weather cleared, collaboration restarted, and both arms could work together much more effectively than the army alone.
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.
> ...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.
Voicing your concerns will just get you a meeting with HR no matter how tactful you think you’re being
Prices law is relevant here:
50% of the work is done by the square root of the total number of people who participate in the work.
Probably of the value, not work per se? I have worked with 1 person of 1000s who I thought was literally doing nothing work related all day.
I think our processes are terrible as an industry. I have brought this up many times but we don't understand what actually works when something goes right and what failed when something went wrong. Adding to this is that engineers love tools and process so they tend to credit tools and process with success because we like the machine. Giving it credit where credit wasn't due leads to slowly growing more elaborate process and tools over time. This love of tools and process is a fundamental flaw in our culture and it is a big part of why big teams fail and small ones can get things done.
There are two fundamental truths to software, or any real organizational level problem. First, you don't know what the solution is until you have actually built it and are using it and second designing and building something is a non-polynomial growth problem.
The first part of the problem we sort of get, sometimes. The solution is iteration for the same reason it has always been. Assess, step, assess, step isn't just a good way to train a NN, it is also a great way to do pretty much anything where you don't know the optimal solution. Take the gradient of the situation and then take a right sized step in the right direction. Think you can have a perfect design before you start coding? You are basically saying you can take one big step from the start to the end. Either you have a small problem to solve or you are deluding yourself. Successful software is iterative. It always was and always will be. If your retrospective says things like 'if we had just done X from the start' be very careful because you are falling into the hindsight trap. You really couldn't have known X was the right thing. There is a reason you didn't see X. Just accept the iterative nature and own it. Try for appropriate step sizes, do good regular assessments, keep the iterations tight and you will probably be ok.
The second problem, NP growth, is where things really fall off the rails though. People get iterative, they see it work, even if they don't understand what they are really doing, but NP complexity growth is a real killer. The problem is that it actually IS true that if you took more time and put all the pieces together and solved it all as one problem you technically could eventually find the better solution. But more than likely the heat death of the universe will catch you before you do. Oh, yeah, and the total information storage needed to document the combinations tried will likely kill you too. There is only one good solution to NP growth, accept a local minimum and divide and conquer.
NP complexity growth is the foundational problem that needs to be attacked and the why things work or don't. Even more than iterative in many cases. As a problem grows its complexity, the possible number of solutions to check, grows in an NP way. The only solution is to drop the number of options to consider. You have to divide the problem and admit a local optimum is the best practical solution. People -sort of- get this by pretending to break the problem up and give it to different people or teams but then totally blow it. Jira is an example of totally blowing it. So you broke the problem down and you broke the teams into smaller pieces to address those sub problems but then you threw it all in one place again in Jira and you had all the teams in the same standup. You can't do that. That is the point of divide and conquer. You do that and you get lost because the problem just got too big again when you put all the pieces together. Also, communication scales up with people, even without problem size changing. Create too big of a team and the communication eats all the available work. Divide and conquer -requires- not communicating, or at least being exceptionally careful about how you communicate between problems.
The processes and tools we have created and love to use so much are the heart of why things don't work and we need to start admitting that. They give us a false sense that we can make a team bigger or take a bigger problem on. That is a mistake.
If you have done a good job of dividing a problem up, and correctly sized teams, then you have created problems that are clear enough not to need status boards and the like. Sure, go ahead and use them if your small team likes that. Be my guest, but you probably shouldn't. If a team is iterating on their problem and the problem is appropriately scoped then the team knows the state of their entire piece so well that the status boards slow them down. Why put in a jira ticket when you can just deal with it? Why break your internal team communications like that? Team management and project management become easy with small teams since your options are limited and the problem is small so it is all obvious. If you are saying to yourself 'well how will we know the whole thing is on track' well if you divided correctly then every level has a human sized understanding to deal with and is keeping track of their piece. That includes the team that owns teams. They should have designed the teams working for them, and the problems those teams are dealing with, in such a way that the working memory state is enough. They also designed the communication to that team in a way that they stay informed -without- joining that team and in doing so joining all teams. In other words they don't micro manage because that breaks divide and conquer. If any level is lost then the problem may not have been broken down well or has changed. A good iterative team catches this and raises the flag quickly so the divide can happen again if needed. The team leading the team has the job of monitoring to help figure this out, but monitoring in very limited ways so that they don't end up micro managing and collapsing the divisions.
A good military know this and a bad one has forgotten it. In WWII we had task forces for everything. They could stand up a TF, get it training so that it was a coherent entity, execute the mission needed and tear it apart. We were amazing at it. When WWII ended we did big things because we carried our understanding of the operational level of war, how to break apart problems and teams, into industry. We went to the moon. Now however we have standing task forces in the US military that are essentially the leftovers from WWII. We crate new task forces, badly, that are really just the existing ones renamed which means they have their old job and new job and nothing has really been broken out and isolated correctly. We suck at war and a big reason for this is that we have forgotten the operational level of war lessons from WWII.
This is a long rant to get to this final point. The author doesn't get the real reason why '20%' does the work. It is because we hire and create massive teams that can't get anything done because their communication has scaled to 1000% of their capacity. So, naturally, a small core team forms that can effectively communicate and get a job done, by ignoring he other 80%. It isn't the other 80%'s fault, it is the organizations fault for not breaking things up and creating small teams where the size of the problem is understandable and actionable and, most importantly, not re-merging the problem and the teams with stupid things like Jira boards.
The real solution is the same set of solutions that work time and time again. Create small teams. Give them clear problems to solve and the right tools and authority to solve them. Put bounds on what they should be doing so they, and you, don't get distracted. Understand that a problem is an evolving iterative thing and lean into that. If 80% of your workforce isn't doing things then your organization is broken. Start figuring out how to fix it. Collaboration isn't bullshit. It is fundamental. We just need to actually, intentionally, design that collaboration based on the actual things that shape it. NP growth and iterative understanding.
You know you can just say no right?
And if the job is ass like that just get a new job.
Or start your own company.
This article is just a complaint slop, and complainers are just as bad if not worse. Do something.
Article is a thought leadership style piece. By commenting on business you pedistal yourself and can charge for consultancy or even (as in this case) to read premium content. The thought leadership style is generally opinionated and matter of fact. They are, after all the expert.
The core issue is that collaboration bullshit is fantastic for mediocre people who cannot produce anything of value and as the team grows, the share of mediocre people will inevitably grow. This is why every single large organization turns into a theatre of processes.