Collaboration Is Bullshit — The Few Build, the Many Meet

Organizational dysfunction of collaboration culture, based on Joan Westenberg's essay.

Only a Minority Pulls the Trigger

S.L.A. Marshall's WWII research found only 15-20% of soldiers actually fired their weapons in combat. IBM discovered in the 1960s that 80% of usage came from 20% of features. The same pattern repeats in every organization — a minority produces most of the results.

The rest provide "structural support." Not inherently bad, but the problem is refusing to acknowledge this imbalance.

What Did Collaboration Tools Actually Solve?

Notion, ClickUp, Slack, Jira, Monday, Teams — tools piled up. Did output increase? No. Activity increased.

Transparency gets confused with progress. Visibility gets confused with accountability. "Being in the thread" equals "owning the outcome." Collaboration became a simulation of participation.

The Ringelmann Effect and Brooks's Law

1913, Ringelmann Effect: as group size increases, individual effort decreases. Solo tug-of-war gets 100% effort per person; with 8 people, it drops to 49% each.

Frederick Brooks wrote in 'The Mythical Man-Month' (1975) — adding people to a late project makes it later. Communication paths with n people: n(n-1)/2. 10 people means 45 paths. 20 people means 190.

Meetings breed meetings. Kickoffs, syncs, reviews, retros — an endless cycle of coordination overhead disconnected from actual execution.

Where Does High-Quality Work Come From?

Dostoevsky wrote 'The Brothers Karamazov' alone. The Apollo Guidance Computer was built by a small MIT team with clear ownership boundaries.

Complex, high-quality work mostly comes from individuals or small groups with clear authority and responsibility. Collaboration only functions as language that wraps the result.

Collaboration Kills Ownership

When collaboration becomes cultural norm, solo decisions are labeled "uncooperative." Making your own calls and bearing consequences — real ownership — starts feeling antisocial.

Most projects now spend more time coordinating than executing. When they fail, the prescription is always "more collaboration." But the real question is: "What are we actually building, and who is responsible for it?"

Returning to Individual Responsibility

Every deliverable needs exactly one person who owns the outcome. Even if collaboration structures obscure that person's existence.

Not everything needs organization-wide oversight. Replace excessive management and metric-obsessed culture with individuals managing their own work, evaluated by results.

Drop the warm but expensive fiction of "collaboration," and you can finally see who's actually pulling the trigger.