Collaboration Has Its Limits

Sometimes it’s better to find a little space

Cubicles and closed doors are out. With collaboration the organizational mantra of our time, managers have transformed the modern office into a sea of open space, where groups of people solve problems together. Online, it’s all about maximizing connectivity and sharing within social networks.

It turns out, though, that for creative problem solving, it pays to have some people in an organization who don’t directly work together. That’s what Jesse Shore, an assistant professor of information systems, found in an October 2015 study. Shore says that doesn’t mean collaboration is necessarily a bad thing. His study, in fact, also demonstrates the benefits of collaboration and a high degree of connectedness among a group of people—or, to use the social science research term, clustering. It all depends on which part of the problem-solving process people are engaged in—searching for information or using the information to come up with solutions.

During their study, Shore and his coauthors at Harvard Business School and Northeastern University found “clustering promotes exploration of information space and inhibits exploration of solution space.” In other words, members of a well-connected group can be more successful when it comes to hunting down information, but they may start to copy each other when asked to generate new ideas.

The bottom line: To spark imaginations and spur creative new approaches, find a little space.