Notes on “"Collaboration" is bullshit.”

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.

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

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

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.

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