“Collaboration” is bullshit

Collaboration isn't a process or a management technique -- it is a communication style. If you want collaboration, you can't take random people and use process to "make them collaborate" -- you need to build your team out of people who are collaborators.

Furthermore, collaboration is not at odds with accountability. Most of the highest performing collaborative teams I've ever worked on have people who are each individually highly accountable for their own contributions, and that's a critical part of what makes them a valuable collaborator.

High performing collaborative teams and teams-of-teams have the ownership culture that he is describing. But they also have a team level view of progress (kanban is one approach, and not a bad one, story backlogs are another, etc.) because any large initiative requires dependency management, throughput flow visibility, and coordination across teams.

Yes, individual small teams with autonomy perform best and should have minimal hard dependencies on other teams. "one piece continuous flow" is similar what he's describing as the optimal team flow with minimal waste, which is what Toyota sought to reach in as many teams as they could. Kanban and such approaches for signaling queues and jobs was a patch when it wasn't possible to get "one piece continuous flow"

But in complex products and projects .. dependencies, uncertainty in requirements, design, knowledge, etc. lead to queues, and thus a need for visibility of the queue. this requires active management of priorities, timelines, risks, and resource allocation, so that it isn't just a blind exercise of "trust me bro".

Progress is also best described as "jobs to be done" (whether user stories, or kanban tasks, or whatever) rather than lines of code or other poor metrics. .. learning things is a job to be done... iterating on design is a job to be done... if these lead to new tangents, restarts, cancellations, code removal, or elimination of bad components, sub-projects, or approaches is just as valuable in the long run as creating new things. All of that requires "collaboration".

I think the issue isn't "collaboration" it is poor "management" and process to organize humans for results.

others need to fill a gap -- the "insecure overachiever" demographic.

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180924-are-you-an-ins...

how do align ruthless sociopaths, gropy / rapey executives, angry mother hens, and phone-it-in interns?

Hah! You just gave me an idea for a new methodology. Date-bound delivery.

- The business tells you what they want, as they do

- The business tells you when they want it, as they do

- The team does not say how long it will take. Instead, they say what they think they can deliver in the time allotted.

- As the date nears, more edge features get trimmed

- As the date arrives, something is always ready to deliver, no matter how miniscule

Such a methodology would ensure delivery, but not necessarily the contents of that delivery. Post mortems would no longer discuss why something took so long, and instead would focus on why features were cut.

If, as you say, the date is always more important, wouldn't such a methodology be worth trying?