17 Aug Why Effective Collaboration Still Isn’t Real Work
How well a team collaborates says nothing about whether it’s doing the right thing.
I started out in digital product development. For almost fifteen years, I’ve worked with teams building new products and features, in large corporations, in startups and scale-ups, and in companies I founded myself. Alongside that, I’ve run certification programs throughout German-speaking Europe in usability, product innovation, and user experience. One scene kept repeating itself, almost identically, no matter the setting.
A product team is building a new feature. User research says customers need X, assuming the organization has research worth trusting in the first place. Leadership believes Y will drive faster revenue, though nobody has ever checked. The product owner says the current system can only support Z in the short term. The team itself would rather build A, it just feels more elegant. Compliance has concerns, as always.
Maybe you’ve played one of these roles yourself, maybe you’ve just watched from the sidelines. Most organizations respond to this kind of situation the same way: another meeting, an OKR cycle, maybe a design sprint, or a workshop that gets everyone around the same table. Every voice gets heard, everyone gets a say. What comes out the other end is a compromise nobody’s really happy with, but everyone’s relieved, because the process felt good and the collaboration was smooth.
That’s exactly where it goes wrong: there was plenty of collaboration. There just wasn’t any work.
Contents
Why Good Collaboration and Real Work Are Two Different Things
Work Answers the What. Collaboration Answers the How.
Why Order of Operations Decides the Outcome
When the External Reference Isn’t Clear
Getting Clarity Is a Leadership Job, Not a Team Event
Conclusion: Why Effective Collaboration Still Isn’t Real Work
Why Good Collaboration and Real Work Are Two Different Things
Most teams assume that good collaboration automatically leads to good work. That assumption is exactly what produces this kind of endless back-and-forth in almost every organization I’ve worked with.
Collaboration and value-adding work answer two different questions, even though everyday language treats them as one and the same. Miss that distinction, and you end up confusing how well a team works together with whether it’s working on the right thing at all. That confusion costs organizations more time than they realize, because another round of good collaboration leaves the real problem untouched.
Work Answers the What. Collaboration Answers the How.
Work is whatever a market or a customer actually needs. It follows an external reference, something outside your own organization, usually the customer, not an internal opinion. That’s the test: does what you’re building actually solve a problem for someone outside the organization? In the example above, the user research answers that question, assuming the customer really is the reference that matters here, and not just one voice among several.
Collaboration is something else. It follows an internal reference, whatever counts as right or appropriate inside the organization, and it describes how a team organizes itself: what meetings happen, how decisions get aligned, who’s looped in and when. That’s inward-facing, not outward-facing. A team can be exceptional at it, smooth meetings, great atmosphere, and still miss the market entirely, because good internal organization says nothing about whether the result actually helps the customer.
The pattern shows up well beyond product teams. A sales team can have tight weekly syncs, clear ownership, and great morale, and still sell right past the market if the offer doesn’t solve customers’ real problem. By every internal measure, the collaboration was excellent. By the external measure, the market, it changed nothing.
Why Order of Operations Decides the Outcome
Collaboration should serve the work, not the other way around. When a team pours energy into collaborating well before it’s clear what the work even is, you get exactly what happened in the workshop example: a compromise that helps no one. It never followed an external reference, only an internal negotiation, one that’s usually won not by the best reference but by the loudest voice, the biggest hierarchy, or simply whichever option meets the least resistance.
It works more reliably the other way around. A team that first settles which problem it’s solving, and for whom, can then talk about roles, meetings, and alignment. The calls it makes are almost automatically better, because every discussion now has a fixed point to measure itself against.
There’s a single question that tests this, and it’s worth asking before the next meeting even gets scheduled: which external reference actually counts here?
Before anyone talks about collaboration, that one question needs an answer.
When the External Reference Isn’t Clear
As simple as that question sounds, it’s rarely one you can answer on the spot. Usually several signals are competing, or the data is thin. In practice, two familiar patterns get in the way.
1. Organizations invent substitute references
When the market signal is unclear, a vacuum opens up. Organizations almost always try to fill that vacuum internally. They reach for substitute references: hierarchy, endless alignment meetings, internal policy.
This is where a common mix-up happens. Compliance and IT security aren’t external references in the market sense. They’re constraints. The customer is the target, compliance is the guardrail around the field. Negotiate the customer’s request against compliance, and you’re fighting a battle that was never real. You don’t negotiate guardrails. You build the solution inside them.
2. Uncertainty gets debated internally instead of tested in the market
When market signals contradict each other, hashing it out in a conference room won’t help. Hours spent fighting for internal agreement only produce a false sense of certainty, not market relevance.
Three rules help in situations like this:
A. Ban substitute references: internal agreement is not a measure of good work. If the market has gone quiet, no compromise in the room will fix that.
B. Hypothesis over consensus: form a clear assumption and test it against the real market at minimal cost. Don’t negotiate it internally, check it externally.
C. Mastery at the periphery: who decides which reference wins when things are unclear? Not the person with the highest salary at the center of the organization, but the person at the periphery, closest to the market and the actual problem.
An unclear external reference doesn’t get solved with more internal meetings. It gets solved with fast experiments in the real market.
Getting Clarity Is a Leadership Job, Not a Team Event
It’s no accident that the loudest voice or plain hierarchy so often wins. It’s a structural problem. When nobody has the authority to set the external reference, something rushes in to fill the gap. The urge to get everyone around the same table is usually just a symptom of that missing clarity. Listening ends up replacing deciding. The example from the start shows this twice over. With compliance and the customer’s request, you don’t need anyone with special power, just someone close enough to the problem to tell the constraint apart from the goal. With leadership’s revenue assumption, the failure runs deeper: someone should have asked for evidence before the decision got made, instead of leaving it to hierarchy.
Fundamentally, this is leadership’s job. Leadership has to build the conditions where the person closest to the problem gets to decide, and that starts with leaders learning to understand how much decision-making room they actually have. What counts isn’t a person’s box on the org chart, it’s their access to evidence.
Once it’s clear which reference applies and who gets to decide, a facilitated workshop to work out where things stand makes sense again too. A well-run session stops being a venue for grinding out compromises and becomes a tool for building the solution inside a framework that’s already clear.
Conclusion: Why Effective Collaboration Still Isn’t Real Work
If you’re calling another meeting tomorrow because your team needs to make a decision, ask first which external reference actually counts, and who gets to decide, not how well you’re all working together. Leave that unresolved, and the next round produces the same result, just with everyone more worn out.
That also means trusting someone to actually make that call, instead of pushing it into the next round of alignment. Whoever knows the external reference best should be the one to name it, not necessarily whoever’s been in the room the longest. Get the reference straight first, and hand that clarity to whoever’s closest to the market. The collaboration conversation can happen after that.
Get in Touch
Many of the teams I work with are stuck in this exact pattern. They keep improving how they collaborate without ever settling which external reference actually counts. The result is better meetings and the same problems as before.
In an initial conversation, I look together with you at where the real leverage points are in your organization. No charge, no pitch, no obligation.