A lot of people say collaboration is the answer. Misryoum editorial team stated that, for modern workplaces, it’s also become a kind of social fog machine.
The story starts far from Slack channels and Jira boards, back in 1944. In the Battle of the Bulge—Hitler’s last-ditch effort to save the Third Reich—the Wehrmacht launched into what was described as a doomed campaign and a doomed gamble from a doomed regime. The brutality mattered because, during the battle, Army historian S.L.A Marshall began interviewing infantry companies who’d been baptised in combat. Three years later, in his 1947 book, Men Against Fire, Marshall’s research showed that just 15-20% of riflemen in active combat positions ever fired their weapons—most kept their heads down. They moved when they were ordered and they held their positions, and they mimicked the outward appearance of a soldier in battle—but shoot, they did not. By any standard organisational metric, the men were present and accounted for, but 4 out of 5 never pulled the trigger.
You can argue the exact numbers, and you can argue the method, and it’s fair to do both. But the ratio keeps showing up—again and again—because it describes something familiar about groups: effort gets distributed unevenly. Misryoum analysis indicates IBM stumbled onto a similar pattern in the ‘60s when they discovered that 80% of computer usage came from 20% of the system’s features. In practice, that’s how it goes when responsibilities and incentives are blurred. A fraction of people do most of the work, and the rest provide what you might—charitably—call “structural support.”
Then the modern tech industry looked at human coordination and participation and decided the solution was “collaboration.” If only 20% of us are operating with a “killer instinct,” we need to be better at managing the shared instincts of the other 80%, right? So collaboration became our shared obsession. We chase “teamwork” like it’s a holy grail, and the tooling arrived like a parade: Notion for documents, ClickUp for tasks, Slack for conversations, Jira for tickets, Monday for boards, Teams for the calls that should been emails, emails for the things that we couldn’t squeeze in anywhere else. And now there are agents attempting to re-invent the whole stack. The average knowledge worker keeps accounts across system after system, switching between applications hundreds of times per day. The result is a staggering amount of coordinated and collaborative activity that never quite becomes anything resembling output.
There’s a messy overlap here—transparency got confused with progress, visibility got confused with accountability, and being included in the thread somehow became the same thing, socially and organizationally, as owning the outcome. 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—so it attaches to your name. Collaborating means the failure belongs to the process. And once that lands culturally, it’s hard to dislodge. Somewhere in the office today (or maybe it’s in your head anyway), you can almost hear the quiet rhythm of people updating status, clicking confirmations, waiting for someone else to decide—there’s a smell too, stale coffee and warm plastic from the laptop chargers—like a background note the day doesn’t quite move past.
Marshall’s riflemen weren’t villains. They were ordinary people responding to diffusion of responsibility that happens inside any group. Maximilien Ringelmann measured the same phenomenon with ropes in 1913, long before there were Slack workspaces to offer an emoji-react to it. Individual effort drops as group size increases; the presence of others dissolves personal responsibility in a way that feels reasonable to the people experiencing it. Frederick Brooks identified the same dynamic in software development in 1975, watching IBM’s System/360 project illustrate his thesis that adding people to a late project makes it later—communication overhead grows faster than headcount, coordination costs compound, and every new person adds capacity along with their relationships to everyone else. Those relationships need maintenance, create misalignment, generate more meetings to address the misalignment those meetings created.
So the collaboration industry—this is where the argument gets sharper—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, then rationalized into teamwork language afterward. Dostoevsky wrote The Brothers Karamazov alone. The Apollo Guidance Computer came from a team at MIT small enough to have real ownership, hierarchical enough that Margaret Hamilton’s name could go on the error-detection routines she personally designed. Communication matters, and shared context matters. But there’s a huge difference between communication as infrastructure to support individual, high-agency ownership—and collaboration as the primary activity of an organisation. And honestly, that’s what a lot of collaboration-first cultures have built: machinery for the social management of work, without doing the work they’re socialising about.
If and when ownership shows up, it looks like an individual who deeply gives a shit, making a call without waiting for group-consensus. They’ll be right sometimes, 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, and—this part is brutal—ownership is the only mechanism that gets anything across the finish line. And you can see the excess everywhere: standups that announce busy work, documents written to perform thinking so somebody else can perform thinking, retros and kickoffs and WIP meetings spawning more retros, with zero connection to the execution they’re nominally organising.
At some point—Misryoum editorial desk noted the thought lands like a sudden stop—we have to ask what we’re actually producing and who is responsible for producing it. On some level, the answer for “who is responsible for X” has to be one single person, no matter how much collaborative apparatus has been engineered to make that person invisible and dissolve accountability. Maybe we should trust individuals to do their jobs, without every responsibility being visible to an entire organisation, and without follow-ups scheduled by a cadre of overpaid managers with their overfed metrics. Maybe we could let human beings keep their own lists of tasks, and assign blame to them and them alone when they fuck up. Maybe even skip the team-level views of every Kanban, calendar, and task list. And maybe, if we let go of the warm, expensive fiction of collective endeavour, it becomes easier to see who among us are pulling the trigger—and who are just keeping their heads down.