Five Collaboration Platitudes for the Rubbish Bin

Rich Watkins

December 4, 2025

Recently i'm talking less about "collaboration" - preferring to talk about how we can get things going. This is what i've always meant by collaboration anyway, but I am finding that the C word comes with too much baggage. It smuggles too many preconceptions of inefficient and unproductive meetings - of bloated projects - of cooks aplenty and spoiled broth. For some it seems to evoke almost a sense of despair or dread or both - as if anything "collaborative" is doomed to be drawn out and slightly performative - as if "collaboration" is way of choosing to not get anything done.

And yet. Collaboration is the word we have for getting things done with people. Collaboration is the solution to organisations being stuck in silos or people protecting their patch. Even though there is a little too much cliché flying around, "Collaboration" is in most organisations' values and every second TED talk for a very good reason: how we work together really matters. And working together well unlocks what we can achieve.

So let's try and put some empty platitudes and buzzword nonsense in the rubbish bin (or the trash can if you prefer). And instead see what we can see about the practice of productive collaboration. 

Platitude 1: "Collaboration = being nice"

We already said collaboration is about getting things done together. And differences are inevitable. So we could say that collaboration demands healthy conflict, or even healthy conflict is collaboration - and the idea that conflict (even healthy conflict) feels "nice" is way off. Collaboration means attending to difference and tension - these will sometimes contain heat (it is emotional!) and carry weight (they really matter!). We can be respectful and kind - try not to take things personally - and we can avoid the defensive stances that create excess drama. But we shouldn't expect collaboration to always feel nice.

Great collaborators need courage for hard conversations.

Platitude 2: "Collaboration = involving everyone"

Please no! Most of us are drowning in too much involvement and it's getting in the way of collaboration rather than helping. Yet we use "collaboration" as some kind of short hand for letting me stick my fingers in your pie. I want us to remember that exclusion is a fundamental principle of any endeavour. Every group has an edge: these people are included, and these people aren't included. Just adding more people to projects is actually LESS involvement. Let's use an example - 10 people are in a 30 min meeting. This means each person only gets to contribute for 3 mins each. That is bad involvement. Take 6 people out of the same meeting and each of the 4 would get 8 mins to develop ideas, work through questions, and to build trust in meaningful ways.

Contribution = Minutes / Participants 

Great collaborators need to draw boundaries and communicate them clearly.

Platitude 3: "Collaboration = equality"

Power is at play most of the time - my thinking on power is still evolving but I wrote something recently on the pragmatics of accumulating power. When collaborating sometimes we will feel powerFULL and sometimes we will feel powerLESS. Our goal in collaboration isn't equality but getting things done. And sometimes the imbalance of power is appropriate. A good CEO is appropriately more powerful than the intern in most situations. But there might also be contexts (perhaps a meeting about the real experience of the onboarding process) where the intern could even be more powerful. But either way knowing where the power sits makes us more potent - so we shouldn't be naive about power.

Great collaborators need to contend with power and avoid naïve assumptions.

Platitude 4: "Collaboration = always important"

People expect me to encourage more collaboration. When in fact i agree that for the last decade at least we are suffering from collaboration overload. But what isn't helpful is a blanket binary one way or another. Where either collaboration is to be encouraged or to be discouraged. Instead we need to get wiser about when and how to collaborate. Obviously we often can just get on and do things alone. But even when working with others it helps to think of the good alternatives to collaboration. Here are two - maybe a longer post is in order at some point:

1. Selling - if you have a clear idea of what you want to have happen and you don't really want to change the plan, it's not collaboration. You want to sell someone on an idea or a plan. I'm often encouraging leaders to say "hey, can i sell you an idea on X?" rather than "hey, i'd love to collaborate on X". This is not bad! It's often a relief!

2. Negotiating - if we are incentivised towards and committed to opposing outcomes, it's also not really collaboration. We might sit down and work together, but we have positions and interests - we aren't playing with possibilities or co-creating we are negotiating. We can do this with warmth and respect - but the point stands.

Great collaborators need to know when NOT to collaborate - and what to do instead.

Platitude 5: "Collaboration = complicated"

Because collaboration is difficult people assume it's complicated. And this means they often overcomplicate it. This often but not always means too many people and too much process. But this all presupposes that figuring out every last detail is the key to good collaboration. Collaboration is better understood as complex (interrelated, entangled) - and I made a 3 min video about this a few years back with the analogy of raising a child - another complex thing that we can overcomplicate. We more often need a chat over lunch than we need a special workshop, more often we need a pertinent question more than lengthly answers. Some very difficult things are actually quite simple. This is why The Let's Go model is kind of obvious but also works so well.

Great collaborators don't overcomplicate things.

Collaboration is about getting things done with people

And that means

• It won't always be nice

• We don't need to involve everyone

• There wont always be equality

• We don't need to collaborate on everything

• We shouldn't overcomplicate it