The Collaboration Trap

Collaboration has become one of those organisational ideas that is difficult to argue against. We encourage people to collaborate, design roles around collaboration and often judge teams by how well they work together. In multidisciplinary environments, the ambition can go further still: teams are encouraged to become more integrated, more interdisciplinary and, at the apparent end point, transdisciplinary.

The language sounds progressive. But it can also create a misleading assumption: that more collaboration represents better teamwork.

It does not always.

As we explored in The Problem With Problem-Solving, the starting point should be the problem itself. And as Too Many Cooks or Many Heads? argued, the value of additional expertise depends on whether the problem actually requires a broader cognitive repertoire. The same logic should apply to collaboration.

Before asking people to work together more closely, we should first ask what kind of work the problem requires them to do together.

The terminology is useful — until it becomes a hierarchy

Multidisciplinary work comes with a slightly messy vocabulary. Teams may be described as mono-, multi-, inter- or transdisciplinary, and the terms are not always used consistently.

At their simplest, they describe different ways of organising expertise. A monodisciplinary response relies predominantly on one professional domain. Multidisciplinary working brings several disciplines around the same issue while allowing their contributions to remain relatively distinct. Interdisciplinary working involves greater exchange and integration between those perspectives, while transdisciplinary approaches can go further, creating shared ways of understanding or solving a problem that move beyond conventional disciplinary boundaries.

These distinctions can be useful. The problem begins when they are treated as stages of development.

Mono becomes basic. Multi becomes better. Inter becomes sophisticated. Trans becomes the aspiration.

But there is no reason why increasing integration should automatically represent increasing quality. The same multidisciplinary team may need to work in very different ways depending on the problem in front of it. Professional diversity tells us who is available; it does not tell us how those people should work together.

The label tells us less than we think. What matters is how expertise is organised around the work.

Put the problem before the team

Consider a relatively well-defined problem. The issue is reasonably clear, the relevant expertise is identifiable and credible solution pathways already exist. In that situation, one specialist may be able to manage the problem effectively. Several others may need visibility, information or coordination, but there may be little value in asking everybody to reconstruct the problem and develop the response collectively.

That is not poor teamwork. It may be exactly the right teamwork.

The distinction between coordination and collaboration is important here. Coordination allows different professional contributions to remain relatively separable while ensuring that they align. Collaboration requires greater interdependence: people work jointly on a shared problem and influence how it is understood or solved. Where the work is genuinely separable, deeper integration can add complexity without adding capability.

The picture can change as a problem becomes more ill-defined or complex. Causes may be uncertain, several explanations may be plausible and relevant knowledge may be distributed across different professional domains. If no individual can adequately represent the problem alone, the interaction between perspectives may become part of the problem-solving process.

But even here, complexity does not automatically mean “bring everyone together”.

An ill-defined problem only benefits from greater integration when the additional people bring knowledge or perspectives that materially improve how the problem is understood or addressed. Transdisciplinary working may therefore be appropriate in some circumstances, but it is one possible configuration rather than an organisational destination.

Collaboration has a cost

This is easy to overlook because collaboration is usually discussed in terms of its benefits.

Bringing expertise together can broaden the information available to a problem, expose assumptions and create solutions that would be difficult for one discipline to develop alone. But it also creates additional demands. More information needs to be processed. More professional relationships need to be coordinated. Interpretations may compete. Priorities may conflict. Time is consumed establishing alignment.

In other words, the system we create to solve the problem can itself become a source of complexity.

This is particularly relevant when the task is not actually a collective problem at all.

Sometimes there is simply a decision for an accountable person to make. A coach may need to choose a course of action. A leader may need to select between competing priorities. A manager may need to approve or reject a proposal. Others may provide valuable information or challenge, but that does not necessarily mean the decision itself needs to become collaborative.

When every problem, task and decision is routed through the team, collaboration can become theatre: everyone is involved, everyone contributes, and accountability becomes progressively less clear.

The aim should therefore be neither maximum integration nor maximum professional independence.

It should be what Adaptive Teaming describes as minimum necessary interdependence: enough interaction to give the problem access to the expertise it needs, without creating additional coordination that contributes little to solving it.

From fixed teams to Adaptive Teaming

This changes the question.

Instead of asking whether a team is multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary, we can ask:

Who does this problem need, when do they need to contribute, and how closely does their expertise need to interact?

That leads to three more practical modes of working.

A specialist mode may be sufficient where one professional domain can adequately represent and address the problem. A coordinated mode may be appropriate where several contributions are required but can remain relatively distinct. An integrated mode may be necessary where progress depends on different forms of expertise interacting to change the representation of the problem or generate the solution.

Crucially, these are not fixed identities.

The same team may move between them as the problem evolves. An initially ill-defined problem might require broader integration while the team is trying to understand what is happening, before responsibility narrows once the problem becomes clearer. Equally, the failure of an apparently straightforward intervention may expose new uncertainty and require the problem-solving system to widen again.

That capacity to deliberately configure and reconfigure expertise around changing problem demands is Adaptive Teaming.

And it is where Blended Intelligence becomes more than simply assembling capable people.

Blended Intelligence is concerned with giving a problem access to the knowledge, perspectives, heuristics and judgement it actually requires, and then organising those resources in a way that allows them to contribute effectively. Sometimes that means protecting specialist autonomy. Sometimes it means coordinating several experts. Sometimes it means deliberately integrating different perspectives because no individual view is sufficient.

The goal is therefore not more collaboration.

It is better problem–team fit.

High-performing teams should not aspire to work together as much as possible. They should become better at recognising when expertise needs to remain distinct, when it needs to be coordinated and when it genuinely needs to be integrated.

The best team is not the most collaborative team. It is the team organised appropriately for the problem.