Case study: Why collaboration still isn’t working

I interviewed leaders inside a large, mission-driven organization to figure out why collaboration was still painful–even though they had invested mightily to make it work:

• A major restructuring

• A new operating model explicitly designed to increase collaboration

• Clear messaging that “working together” was the new normal

And yet…

Collaboration still wasn’t working. Not consistently. Not reliably. Not at the level the organization needed.

Why not?

Here’s what we found:

1. Collaboration was personality-driven, not system-enabled

Collaboration happened—but only when the right people were in the room. There were no shared models of: “This is how we collaborate here.” So collaboration felt optional. Variable. Hit-or-miss.

2. The system quietly punished collaboration

Even in an organization that said collaboration mattered, the underlying system told a different story.

People were rewarded for speed, output, and ownership—not for shared effort, effective coordination, or joint success.

Add to that the coordination tax: endless messages and meetings, complex scheduling, invisible administrative burden.

Collaboration felt like extra work, because it was.

3. Absence of a compelling “why?”

Across interviews, there was no clear, shared answer to: What are we actually collaborating for? How does collaboration advance our mission?

Without a unifying “why,” collaboration became procedural rather than purposeful. Burdensome rather than meaningful. When people don’t see the point, they don’t invest the effort.

The big take away?

Collaboration was happening despite the system—not because of it.

If collaboration is a priority in your organization, it’s not enough to restructure, rebrand, or re-message. You have to build the conditions that make collaboration actually work.

At a minimum, that means getting clear on:

• Why collaboration matters in the first place

• What “good” looks like in practice

• How it’s supported (or undermined) by incentives, roles, and norms

Otherwise, you’re left with a familiar outcome:

A lot of talk about collaboration and a lot of friction in actually doing it.

I’ve been working with teams to turn these exact challenges into something more concrete: a shared collaboration playbook tailored to how they actually work.

I’ll share more about what that looks like later this month. Stay tuned!