Collaboration is supposed to be good for organisations. That, at least, is the received wisdom of the last four decades. Flatten the hierarchy, break down the silos, connect the people, and watch performance improve. And yet, something has gone badly wrong. Collaboration — as currently practised in most knowledge-intensive organisations — is not generating the performance gains its advocates promised. It is generating burnout.
The data tell a stark story. According to research conducted by Cross, Rebele, and Grant and published in the Harvard Business Review, the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has increased by more than 50% over two decades, with many knowledge workers now spending upward of 80% of their working day in meetings or responding to colleagues’ requests [1]. Atlassian’s 2024 State of Meetings report found that 78% of workers say they are expected to attend too many meetings, while more than half said they regularly work overtime simply to complete the individual tasks that collaborative demands have displaced [2]. And the critical insight from the HBR research — one that has only sharpened since its 2016 publication — is that this burden is not evenly distributed. Between 20% and 35% of the value-added collaboration in a typical organisation flows through just 3% to 5% of its people.
That concentration is the mechanism that burns people out in collaboration. And understanding it — at a structural, rather than a cultural or motivational level — is the essential first step in doing anything about it.
This article is not an argument against collaboration. Working together to accomplish things that individuals cannot achieve alone has been fundamental to human organisation throughout history [3, 4], and it remains indispensable. The argument is a different one: that the structural conditions under which collaboration now operates in most organisations — the team sizes, the degrees of virtuality, the levels of task complexity, the volume of technology-mediated interaction, and the absence of any serious attempt to manage the human costs of network centrality — make high performance unsustainable and burnout among the most capable people structurally inevitable.
What follows is an explanation of why. It requires some reading. I make no apology for that.
Historical Context: How We Got Here
Most people would say they know what a team is, regardless of whether they have worked on one. The term is so widely used as to be almost meaningless [5]. In an organisational setting, every person is likely to identify with several teams simultaneously. Even in our private lives, group membership gives us a sense of identity and defines who we are.
This should come as no surprise. We are tribal and social by nature. Forming groups to collaborate on tasks we cannot complete independently has been common to humans throughout history [3] — and is just as prevalent in the natural world [6–8]. The study of organisational groups and teams is, as a result, one of the most intensively researched domains in organisational science, despite — or perhaps because of — more than a century of accumulated evidence [9].