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In 1944, the Wehrmacht launched into Hitler’s last ditch effort to save the Third Reich. The Battle of the Bulge was a doomed campaign and a doomed gamble from a doomed regime, but its brutality was a true second test of the US Army on the Western Front. During the battle, Army historian S.L.A Marshall began interviewing infantry companies who’d been baptised in combat. Published 3 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 debate the extent of Marshall’s numbers, and you can debate his methodology, but his ratio shows up, again and again. IBM stumbled onto it in the ‘60s when they discovered that 80% of computer usage came from 20% of the system’s features. The pattern recurs because it describes something real about how effort is distributed inside groups, where a fraction of the people do most of the work, and the rest provide what you might ~charitably call “structural support.”
Anyone who has worked in any large organisation knows exactly what I’m talking about.
The modern tech industry looked at the problem of 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%. And so collaboration became our shared obsession. We pursue “teamwork” as a holy grail.
The teamwork revolution, if you can call it that, gave us Notion for our documents, ClickUp for our tasks, Slack for our conversations, Jira for our tickets, Monday for our boards, Teams for the calls that should been emails, emails for the things that we couldn’t squeeze in anywhere else, and now agents attempting to re-invent the whole stack. The average knowledge worker maintains accounts across system after system, switching between applications hundreds of times per day. And they produce, in aggregate, a staggering amount of coordinated and collaborative activity that never actually becomes anything resembling ~output.
When you strip away the product marketing and the dev relations and the blog posts and the funding rounds and the fuckery-upon-fuckery of it all, we’re left with a simulation of collective engagement - but very little else. Transparency got confused with progress, visibility got confused with accountability, and being included in the thread became the same thing, socially and organizationally, as owning the outcome.
Once that confusion set in at the cultural level it became nearly impossible to dislodge. 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, in ways that attach to your name.
Collaborating means the failure belongs to the process.
So everyone chose collaboration, and we called it culture.
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