Moreover, the closer you look at the collaboration research, the more caveats you find. Yes, collaboration in the office has seemed fundamental to solving big problems. This is in part because although casual conversations aren’t immediately productive, they build the trust necessary for groups to freely exchange ideas and feedback without making everybody hate one another. But a great deal of office-based collaboration turns out to have been pure wasted time. Other research suggests that we’ve been consumed by “collaboration overload” for years and that we might be better off clawing back up to 20 percent of collaboration time for ourselves to avoid burning out from an eternal purgatory of circling, circling, circling back.
No one is an island. You can accomplish a lot more with help.
The fashion for collaboration makes some sense. The point of organisations is that people can achieve things collectively that they cannot achieve individually. Talking to your colleagues can spark valuable insights. Mixing with people from different departments can be useful. But this hardly justifies forcing people to share large noisy spaces or bombarding them with electronic messages. Oddly, the cult of collaboration has reached its apogee in the very arena where the value of uninterrupted concentration is at its height: knowledge work.
Some employees are such enthusiastic collaborators that they are asked to weigh in on every issue. But it does not take long for top collaborators to become bottlenecks: nothing happens until they have had their say—and they have their say on lots of subjects that are outside their competence.
When we see others as separate, they become a threat. When we see others as part of us, as connected, as interdependent, then there is no challenge we cannot face-together.