Data Driven Collaboration

Collaboration is generally accepted unreflectingly as a good and worthwhile pursuit in business. You can search Harvard Business Review's collaboration articles in vain for any questioning of its value or efficacy for an organization to encourage and facilitate. An aspirational organizational value may not be the best thing along the very most important value axis however--your own career. Many managers learn math as part of accounting and finance, and should be well-suited to apply the simple formula to determine whether they should collaborate or not, but may be surprised at how far the odds of success the more people need to succeed along with them. To this end, managers should do a realistic calculation add if the odds of their own success are higher than the odds of the combined success of their collaborators, they should make every attempt to go it alone rather than be dragged down by the albatross of collegial incompetence. If you are the albatross, you should cling for dear life to the tenents of collaboration and teamwork to ameliorate the consequences of failure.

To take a simple example, if you have a 90% chance to succeed, and you are working alone, you have a 90% chance of success. If you are on a team of 5, and you ALL have a 90% chance to succeed, intuition tells many people that the aggregate chance of success for the team is 90%, which is wrong, the actual chance of success, counter-intuitive as it is to many, is 0.90¹⁰ ≈ 35%.

To this end we provide a handy calculator to determine whether collaboration is worthwhile or not. Enter your own chance of success and then the odds of success for all your potential collaborators(note: if you have more collaborators than 9 the odds of success are always already 0). If the odds of your collaborators all succeeding are less than your own personal chance of success, you should avoid collaboration.

Once you know whether or not you should encourage or avoid collaboration, there is still the important social issue of doing so without causing resentment among the higher grade players you're leeching from or the useless ones you're avoiding. Good management consulting can help hone this important executive skill.

Disclaimer: Peculiar Industries, LLC. provides consulting services helping managers and executives learn effective techniques for diplomatically insinuiating or evading colleagues. Contact us for a free consultation.