How much collaboration is too much collaboration?

The other day I was discussing with my wife the weekend plans. There were soccer games for kids, we had some social plans and other things to do and we also wanted to exercise a bit every day. As all families, there is a lot to share, discuss and coordinate and frequently not enough time to do everything properly, so we started talking about it contemplating different options for to solve the agenda puzzle. After a while I felt frustrated and stuck as we were not making apparent progress. The conversation seemed like a waste of time so I offered my followership to her: “Come up with a plan and I will gladly follow it”, I said. In exchange, I had time to go and do something else that was pressing me but I couldn’t help but start thinking about collaboration at work… 

Is collaboration always good? Is there an optimal amount of collaboration after which more collaboration results in smaller and smaller increments of benefits? If so, what is such optimum? Furthermore, is excessive collaboration a sign of lack of trust and accountability? Big problems in many corporations! Too little collaboration and you end up with suboptimal decisions, duplication of efforts, lack of alignment and most important a poor employee engagement and lack of innovation. Too much collaboration and you end up loosing market opportunities, developing cumbersome processes, taking long time on decision making, and falling into employee complacency and lack of accountability. What is worst?

If you have unlimited time, you can continue collaborating endlessly, but this is not an option in real life. I studied diversity for a few years in the past and I found out that while diversity is generally desired, studies showed that it is only beneficial when you have time to reconcile the differences of opinion inherent to a diverse group, and your team’s task is complex, requiring such different views to optimally realize it. The studies suggest that if you are in a time crunch and the scope of your problem is more about execution and operations than creation, then diversity will go against attaining your objective.

Similarly, if you are developing a new product or solving a complex problem, collaborating across your organization is the right thing to do. On the contrary, if you need to act on an urgent customer’s request, too much collaboration will probably make you miss the whole point. It is known that too many cooks in the kitchen will spoil the sauce. How many people do you need to decide on a hotel venue? And the new corporate logo? And who makes hiring decisions? Etc, etc. When it gets complex I always like to use the RACI model (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed). 

So, collaboration? Yes of course! but not to a limit of inefficiency, unless you have all the time of the world (in which case I would want to know in what world do you live in). Have the courage to recognize and say to your team when you think you have gone over the optimal point in collaborating!