alt Hacker NewsIt'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.
Yeah, I think the author strays a bit away from the title.
The author says, "The collaboration industry has spent a fortune obscuring a dirty truth: most complex, high-quality work is done by individuals or very small groups operating with clear authority and sharp accountability" which means collaboration can work... in the right environment and with the right people. I work in R&D and I could not imagine not working in a collaborative environment. It's not reasonable to have expertise at everything and it's understood that things have to get done no matter whose name is on the ticket/story.
I also agree on you calling out Men against Fire example as well. That's not a collaboration issue, that's a training issue (amongst other things). And that problem went away as you said.
> By 1946, the US Army had accepted Marshall’s conclusions, and the Human Resources Research Office of the US Army subsequently pioneered a revolution in combat training which eventually replaced firing at ‘bulls eye’ targets with deeply ingrained ‘conditioning’ using realistic, man-shaped ‘pop-up’ targets that fall when hit. Psychologists know that this kind of powerful ‘operant conditioning’ is the only technique which will reliably influence the primitive, mid-brain processing of a frightened human being. Fire drills condition terrified school children to respond properly during a fire. Conditioning in flight simulators enables frightened pilots to respond reflexively to emergency situations. And similar application and perfection of basic conditioning techniques increased the rate of fire to approximately 55 percent in Korea and around 95 percent in Vietnam.