The Myth of Spontaneous Collaboration

We love the myth of spontaneous collaboration.

A brilliant idea > A quick meeting > Everyone jumps in > Magic happens.

Except that's usually not what happens.

Good outcomes rarely happen by accident. They happen because someone thought about the process.

Collaboration without preparation is interruption. It might be important interruption. But it IS interruption.

And spontaneous collaboration is really just unplanned work.

Now someone has to:

Context switch > Stop current work > Mentally reorient > Learn the problem > Formulate responses in real time.

All before they even know whether they're the right person for the conversation.

Magic does not happen.

Collaboration works best when people know why they're collaborating, in environments that best support continuity and action.

Give people a chance to prepare.

Let them decline if they aren’t the right person, or point you to the person who is.

Eliminate the very real risk of losing all that brilliant collaboration because it happened next to a Keurig instead of somewhere it could be followed with documentation and planning.

The irony is that the RTO crowd often describes spontaneous collaboration as efficient.

A lot of the time, it's the opposite.

It feels efficient because it moves the work immediately. But it often creates more interruptions, more meetings, worse decisions, less preparation, and less documentation.

If you can’t explicitly state, preferably with more evidence than your feelings, what will be enhanced by having the conversation onsite and how it will improve operations or delivery, it doesn’t need to happen in your conference room or around your proverbial watercooler.

Respect people's time.

Give context.

Let people think before they respond.

Don't force real-time processing, especially not onsite, when asynchronous preparation would produce a better outcome.