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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
> ...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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
Not sure men fighting for their lives in WW2 is the best comparison point for dev teams having too many standups and retros.
> ...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.
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.