Too much collaboration is detrimental

Too much collaboration is detrimental.

Many leaders constantly recommend or guide their teams to collaborate closely with other teams. I know they have good intentions, but that’s harmful.

Good collaboration has a scope and time limits. If we give two groups of people a common goal to achieve, they “become” one team and can achieve remarkable results. However, if we tell a team to collaborate with five others simultaneously, that’s nothing besides chaos.

Great solutions require focus and dedicated effort. To achieve great results, you have to eliminate distractions.

Many leaders use Team Topologies to promote collaboration and fall into the trap of having strong collaborations with many teams. However, Manuel Pais and Matthew Skelton say in their book that there shouldn’t be an active collaboration with five teams.

If you want to streamline your team and resolve the puzzles, aim to minimize cross-team collaboration and reduce the scope of each collaboration, establish clear domain boundaries and reduce people’s cognitive load.