Interesting article, on many levels. I like that Google was alright with this woman working on a project for three years that had little measurable result, but did provide an emotional result that makes life better for Googlers.

And it ties in directly to the research I have been doing recently for my client, on effective collaboration.

The Harvard Business Review article "Collaborative Overload" is a good starting place, but the original research from Rob Cross at the University of Virginia is even better.

tl:dr version of his research: We are drowning in collaboration requests because none of these tools - email, meetings, Slack, Yammer, Jive, IM, etc - put any constraints on connections, and have extremely poor methods for retrieving data. For one-to-one quick communication they work fine. But when people need to collaborate, these tools lack the structure to make it easy to surface past decisions, the latest versions of documents, etc. "Structured Collaboration" is the future, because it gives everyone a clear understanding of where to find the information they need, without sapping the time/resources of the key collaborators who are already overwhelmed.

I'll end with a scary stat from his research: If you are an average employee at a company, 80% of your time is spent on "unstructured collaboration" of email, meetings, and phone calls, and only 20% of your time - one hour a day, or one day a week - is you actually applying your unique skill set and doing the work you are paid to do. The rest is fluff.