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.
Is it really, though? I mean, I know how annoying 'busywork' can be. How meetings can feel like a waste of time. And for some jobs, that 80% is probably a grave underestimation. That said, work is never just about doing what you're best at. Collaboration can be time consuming tediousness but at the end of the day, there's topics that need to be discussed and decisions that need to be made as a team. It might be unstructured but it is still collaboration.The rest is fluff.
Sure. And water is good for you. Unless you get too much of it. And if you read through the research I linked to, collaboration is a Good Thing. It is the mountain of collaboration requests, and the poor methods (like meetings) within which people collaborate. Almost all meetings are wasteful. They are too long, too late, and too many people. Most meetings should be three people, standing in a hallway, discussing a specific point, for less than 5 minutes. And yet we have meetings with 7 people, scheduled for half an hour, three days from now (because that was the first opening when all 7 people were available). So yes. There is good collaboration. But the science proves that we very rarely engage in collaboration in a productive and sustainable way.
In that case your tl;dr wasn't quite clear enough to me. It seemed to me like you made a distinction between the unstructured collaboration and actual work, implying that we spend most of our time on useless busywork and only 20% on our own, non-collaborative work. What I was trying to say was that that even unstructured collaboration has a lot of useful moments, albeit spread out thinly.