Collaboration is wildly overrated — and it’s often the single biggest problem inside organisations. Don’t believe me?
And yet we all know there’s one word in corporate life that everyone loves to say, nobody ever dares question, and gets stuffed into every possible context: that word is collaboration.
You see it in job descriptions: “looking for team players”, “excellent collaborative skills”; you hear it in meetings: “let’s loop them in so we can collaborate”…
Translation: let’s drag as many people as possible into every discussion, so nobody actually decides anything and any potential accountability gets smeared across an indefinite continuum of contributors.
Less charitably, I’d argue that most of what we call collaboration is a carefully engineered fiction — designed to shield the chain of command from responsibility while simultaneously applying a healthy dose of moral pressure on the usual handful of people who actually do the work. And who, incidentally, now do it worse, because they’re forced to burn time in pointless meetings and cater to everyone’s idiosyncrasies.
The more “collaboration” increases inside a company, the more reliably three things happen:
1. Work slows to a crawl. Every decision requires three calls, two alignment sessions, and a slide deck “to share” and get “everyone on the same page”. Here’s the thing: you’re not working. You’re narrating the work.
2. Ownership evaporates. If ten people decide, nobody decides. If the outcome is terrible, it’s always “the process’s fault”.
3. The project gets watered down. Since everyone needs to justify their salary, everyone has to add their piece. Nobody can actually steer this cacophony, and scope creep wins by default.
The result is invariably a bloated mess that nobody loves but nobody can object to. Perfect for dying of irrelevance.
The point is: this isn’t collaboration. It’s bureaucracy with a nicer name.
And then there’s the great corporate paradox: the further you climb, the more you “collaborate” — meaning at some point your job becomes commenting on other people’s work.
And we call that added value.
Now, I’m not saying working together is useless. I’m saying that in corporate organisations, the tendency to overdo it is almost gravitational.
In my experience, the work that actually creates impact mostly happens when one person — or a small group — makes a decision, owns the risk, and sees it through.
Collaboration works well when it’s used sparingly and deliberately. When it becomes the default, it becomes background noise — and in a company, background noise is the most expensive thing that exists, because it gives you the illusion that something is happening while in reality nobody is doing a damn thing.