In 1944, the Wehrmacht launched into Hitler’s last-ditch effort to save the Third Reich. The Battle of the Bulge was a doomed gamble from a doomed regime, but its brutality served as a true test of the U.S. Army. During the chaos, a Misryoum analysis noted that Army historian S.L.A. Marshall began interviewing infantry companies fresh from combat. Published years later, the findings showed that just 15–20% of riflemen in active positions ever fired their weapons; most kept their heads down, mimicking the appearance of a soldier while never pulling the trigger.
By any standard organizational metric, those men were present and accounted for, but four out of five never engaged. Misryoum editorial desk notes that while you can debate the methodology, the ratio persists—IBM stumbled onto a similar pattern in the 60s, discovering 80% of system usage came from only 20% of features. It’s an uncomfortable reality about how effort is distributed: a fraction does the work, and the rest provide what you might charitably call “structural support.”
The modern tech industry looked at this and decided “collaboration” was the fix. If only 20% have a killer instinct, we need to better manage the other 80%. And so, teamwork became our holy grail. The resulting revolution gave us Notion, ClickUp, Slack, Jira, Monday, and Teams—plus the agents trying to reinvent it all. The average knowledge worker switches between these systems hundreds of times a day, producing a staggering amount of coordinated activity that never becomes actual output. Actually, is it output? Or just noise?
When you strip away the product marketing and the endless funding rounds, we are left with a simulation of collective engagement. Transparency was confused with progress; being included in the thread became the same thing as owning the outcome. It’s a comfortable confusion. The feeling of collaboration is pleasant in a way that personal accountability—that cold, sharp blade of responsibility—can never be. Owning something means you, specifically, can fail. Collaborating means the failure belongs to the process, or the, uh, team.
Maximilien Ringelmann measured this in 1913 with ropes, long before Slack workspaces existed. Individual effort drops as group size increases; the presence of others dissolves the sense of personal responsibility. Frederick Brooks identified the same in 1975: adding people to a late project makes it later. Communication overhead grows faster than headcount. It produces a cycle of meetings about the misalignment that the previous meetings created.
We need to find a path back to trusting individuals. Maybe—just maybe—we could let people keep their own lists, sink or swim by their own hand, and assign blame to them alone when they mess up. If we let go of the warm, expensive fiction of collective endeavor, we might actually see who is pulling the trigger and who is just keeping their heads down.