"Collaboration" is bullshit.

In 1944, the Wehrmacht launched into Hitler’s last ditch effort to save the Third Reich. The Battle of the Bulge was a doomed campaign and a doomed gamble from a doomed regime, but its brutality was a true second test of the US Army on the Western Front. During the battle, Army historian S.L.A Marshall began interviewing infantry companies who’d been baptised in combat. Published 3 years later in his 1947 book, Men Against Fire, Marshall’s research showed that just 15-20% of riflemen in active combat positions ever fired their weapons - most kept their heads down. They moved when they were ordered and they held their positions, and they mimicked the outward appearance of a soldier in battle - but shoot, they did not. By any standard organisational metric, the men were present and accounted for, but 4 out of 5 never pulled the trigger. 

You can debate the extent of Marshall’s numbers, and you can debate his methodology, but his ratio shows up, again and again. IBM stumbled onto it in the ‘60s when they discovered that 80% of computer usage came from 20% of the system’s features. 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.”

Anyone who has worked in any large organisation knows exactly what I’m talking about. 

The modern tech industry looked at the problem of human coordination and participation and decided the solution was “collaboration.” If only 20% of us are operating with a “killer instinct” we need to be better at managing the shared instincts of the other 80%. And so collaboration became our shared obsession. We pursue “teamwork” as a holy grail. 

The teamwork revolution, if you can call it that, gave us Notion for our documents, ClickUp for our tasks, Slack for our conversations, Jira for our tickets, Monday for our boards, Teams for the calls that should been emails, emails for the things that we couldn’t squeeze in anywhere else, and now agents attempting to re-invent the whole stack. 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. 

When you strip away the product marketing and the dev relations and the blog posts and the funding rounds and the fuckery-upon-fuckery of it all, we’re left with a simulation of collective engagement - but very little else. Transparency got confused with progress, visibility got confused with accountability, and being included in the thread became the same thing, socially and organizationally, as owning the outcome.

Once that confusion set in at the cultural level it became nearly impossible to dislodge. The feeling of collaboration is pleasant in a way that personal accountability can never be. Owning something means you, specifically and visibly you, can fail at it, specifically and visibly, in ways that attach to your name.

Collaborating means the failure belongs to the process.

So everyone chose collaboration, and we called it culture.

Marshall's riflemen were ordinary people responding to the diffusion of responsibility that happens inside any group. Maximilien Ringelmann measured the same phenomenon with ropes in 1913, long before there were Slack workspaces to offer an emoji-react to it. Individual effort drops predictably as group size increases. The presence of others dissolves the sense of personal responsibility in a way that feels, to everyone experiencing it, entirely reasonable. You're part of a team, you're contributing, you're also (measurably) pulling less hard than you would if the rope were yours alone. Every single person on the rope is doing this simultaneously, which is why the total force never adds up the way the headcount says it should.

Frederick Brooks identified the same dynamic in software development in 1975, watching IBM's System/360 project illustrate his emerging thesis that adding people to a late project makes it later. Communication overhead grows faster than headcount, coordination costs compound, and every new person contributes their capacity along with their relationships to everyone else. Those relationships require maintenance and produce misalignment and generate the need for more meetings to address the misalignment those meetings created.

Brooks might as well have described your company's Q3 roadmap planning cycle and your startup's sprint retrospective, all of which have gotten longer every year and produced, relative to their investment, less.

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.

Communication matters, and shared context matters. 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. Which, if we’re honest, is what most collaboration-first cultures have actually built. They’ve constructed extraordinarily sophisticated machinery for the social management of work, without actually doing the work they’re socialising about. 

If and when it exists, ownership looks like an individual who deeply gives a shit, making a call without waiting for group-consensus. That individual will be right sometimes, and they’ll be wrong other times, and they’ll own it. They won’t sit around waiting to find out who has the authority to move a card from one column to another and post about it in the #celebrations  channel. 

But being that person sucks when “collaboration” is the reigning value, because 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. 

You can see this excess everywhere. Standups where people announce their busy work and as long as everyone’s “on the same page” nobody changes course. Documents that are written to perform thinking so somebody else can perform thinking, with no decision in sight. Retros, and kickoffs, and WIP meetings that spawn their own retros, kickoffs and WIP meetings like cells dividing and re-dividing, with zero connection to the work that it’s nominally organising around. 

Every project now seems to carry more coordination overhead than execution time, and when it fails the postmortem just recommends more collaboration...

At some point (and I think that point was fucking yesterday) we have to ask ourselves - what are we actually producing and who is actually responsible for producing it? 

Because at some level, the answer for “who is responsible for X” has to be one single person, no matter how much the collaborative apparatus layered over modern work has been engineered to make that person invisible and dissolve accountability. 

We need to find some path back to trusting that individuals will do their jobs, without every responsibility being visible to an entire organisation, without follow-ups being scheduled by a cadre of overpaid managers with their overfed metrics. 

Maybe - just maybe - we could make our lives a little easier. Maybe we could let human beings keep their own lists of tasks, and we could let them sink or swim by how they manage those tasks, and we could assign blame to them and to them alone when they fuck up. Maybe we could do it without needing to have team-level views of every Kanban, calendar and task list. And maybe - if we let go of the warm, expensive fiction of collective endeavour - we could make it a little easier to see who among us are pulling the trigger and who are just keeping their heads down.