Against Collaboration?

I suppose there are several reasons why collaboration has become more popular over the past decade.

First, there's a long term cultural/philosophical shift toward radical egalitarianism that is uncomfortable with any distinction among individuals (a topic which is beyond the scope of this blog). Many members of my generation find it a bit disorienting to encounter young people who were raised in a sub-culture where everyone always got a trophy. This perspective emphasizes collaboration over individual initiative (not that the two are necessarily in conflict, but they're not exactly orthogonal).

Associated with this trend is a backlash against the "lone gun" hero stereotype who has a firm grasp on Moral Truth and The One Right Way. And, there's the simple fact that we're creating larger and more complex capabilities...which is only possible when large numbers of individuals sacrifice their interests and desires (to some degree) to achieve a group goal.

In the organizational theory domain, we've seen the rise of Wegner's CoPs and DoD's CoIs, along with a slew of other "communities of" TLAs that attempt to increase the effectiveness of organizational collaboration.

Perhaps the primary reason for the explosion of interest in collaboration recently is the rapid growth of social media capabilities on the Internet. This growth has highlighted one of the key challenges of group action: the formulation and governance of a web/hierarchy of shared purpose.

Since group agility slows exponentially as group size increases, collaboration is a two-edged sword in Complex contexts. The diversity of understandings (of causes, effects, and shared purpose) provided by a group will, on average, probably make sense of a Complex context faster than an individual. On the other hand, if the situation requires a lot of fast exploration of intertwined alternatives, it's not clear that a group will necessarily outperform an individual, especially when purpose, cause, and effect form tangled hierarchies.

Those of us who've worked in group settings recognize there's also a danger of synthesizing several understandings into a mediocre whole. And, the classic danger is the group being hijacked by a strong personality.

As with all such swings, the swing toward collaboration runs the risk of going to an extreme where highly capable individuals are not effectively used.

These observations were triggered by a recent post by Oliver Marks that mentions a 2006 article by David Freedman entitled "What's Next: The Idiocy of Crowds."

As our ability to collaborate increases, we may bump into basic cognitive and social limitations more frequently and violently...it's not clear that all such limitations necessarily point toward more Complicated collaboration tools, processes, or frameworks...they may point instead toward Complex tools, processes, and frameworks.