I'm a little disappointed at the amount of me tooism in this thread. I think a lot of people here have maybe had really bad collaborative experiences. Maybe that's the default? most orgs are going to be bad at most things (tm).
I can't help but think about this paper I ran across over a decade ago, that found a very high correlation between team diversity and paper citations.
This one always stuck with me, partially because of personal biases, but also because it just seems so powerful to have access to different perspectives when trying to build something. I know from personal experience, that when someone on my team has something unusual about them, when we build a thing with them in mind, the final product is just better. It might be related to the old advice of making sure that everyone's computer is different to make it more likely to run into bugs. Or make sure the devs don't have the fastest computers so they notice performance issues. But I also see it a lot in gaming too. If you tell me a game has color blind settings, that immediately gives me a big hint as to the quality of the rest of the game.
So this begs the question to me. What is it about building with someone in mind that is different than the collaboration that the author is talking about? Like, we expect committees to produce spheres. And we expect bike shedding to derail meetings. But what is different? is it agency? is it a single vision for the design? There is definitely something to be said for having one person who really understands the problem being the one to arbitrate all decisions about the thing. Is it how criticism is offered, or maybe whether a criticism can be ignored without social backlash? Is collaboration really that different than customer feedback which is generally seen as healthy for a product?
I can't help but think about this paper I ran across over a decade ago, that found a very high correlation between team diversity and paper citations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.02282
This one always stuck with me, partially because of personal biases, but also because it just seems so powerful to have access to different perspectives when trying to build something. I know from personal experience, that when someone on my team has something unusual about them, when we build a thing with them in mind, the final product is just better. It might be related to the old advice of making sure that everyone's computer is different to make it more likely to run into bugs. Or make sure the devs don't have the fastest computers so they notice performance issues. But I also see it a lot in gaming too. If you tell me a game has color blind settings, that immediately gives me a big hint as to the quality of the rest of the game.
So this begs the question to me. What is it about building with someone in mind that is different than the collaboration that the author is talking about? Like, we expect committees to produce spheres. And we expect bike shedding to derail meetings. But what is different? is it agency? is it a single vision for the design? There is definitely something to be said for having one person who really understands the problem being the one to arbitrate all decisions about the thing. Is it how criticism is offered, or maybe whether a criticism can be ignored without social backlash? Is collaboration really that different than customer feedback which is generally seen as healthy for a product?