Why collaborations fall apart
- Aug 13
- 3 min read
Bad actors, delays, mistakes, corruption: humans may be natural collaborators, but we are often terrible at working with strangers, says Robert Flint
Humans are instinctive collaborators, but inherent difficulties are baked into working with strangers. The more people you work with, the greater the opportunity for misunderstanding and for trust to break down. There is an increasing scope for bad actors, delay, mistakes, corruption, group think and cover-ups.
Imagine a graph with number of humans on the x axis and complexity on the y axis. The relationship is not linear; it is exponential. Each additional human doesn’t just add one unit of complexity, they add one unit of complexity for each of the other people on the team. It is not surprising that when collaborating, things can fall apart, and fast.
Even the best professionals, working in organisations built around referrals, struggle to collaborate effectively. While collaboration is an instinct, we humans are actually terrible at working with strangers. Three lessons stand out about collaboration in the modern world.
Lesson 1: challenge your assumptions
The first is that when we are working in or interacting with institutions or complex systems, we make several assumptions. We assume that experts know what they are doing. We assume that the system works and that everyone in the system has our best interests at heart. When we come face to face with a large organisation, there is a temptation to stop thinking and to rely on the infrastructure around us to keep us safe. Bluntly, when making and receiving referrals we cannot assume our referral partners or our clients know what they are doing. We have to be on our guard.
Lesson 2: be humble, admit errors and learn from failure
In Black Box Thinking, Matthew Syed looks at negligence cases in hospitals, plane crashes and other disasters to analyse why things go wrong. He looks at the transcripts of black box recordings, showing how co-pilots struggle to challenge the decisions of the pilot even, in one case, as he flies the plane into a mountain. Too often, Syed shows, social mores and rigid hierarchies prevent us from challenging authority and also stop us from admitting when we are wrong. They stop us learning from failure.
Instead, humility opens our minds: it makes us willing to accept mistakes and learn from them. Frank honesty is crucial to successful collaboration because it is the starting point for trust.
Lesson 3: work on working with strangers
It takes real skill to work with strangers effectively. Communication needs to be open, direct and without ceremony. It can be ugly and scrappy, so long as the messages are received. Partners need to feel safe to air disagreements and challenge each other. It is therefore preferrable to know, like and trust your referral partners. But even if you do, collaboration is a skill that requires training and practice.
Trusting each other is not simple either. Sociologists have identified two types: cognitive trust and affective trust. The former is the reasoned trust we have towards colleagues, that they will do their job well and on time. Affective trust, meanwhile, is the deeper, heart-led trust, built on emotional connection. We have cognitive trust that a system will work and that laws will be enforced, but affective trust that our friends will be there for us in a crisis.
It is complicated further because cultures place different emphasis on these types of trust. In some, it is important to build affective trust before doing business, often by dining and drinking together. In others, trust is more cognitive and transactional, based on competence and reliability and focussed on the board room not the restaurant. Collaborating across these concepts of trust is difficult.
Sometimes trust is the wrong decision. There is an old Russian proverb, made famous by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s during nuclear arms reduction talks with Mikhail Gorbachev. It implores us to ‘trust, but verify’. In other words, we should trust generously but only up to a certain point.
Notable here is that Reagan came from an American culture where the word trust usually refers to the cognitive transactional kind, whereas Gorbachev is likely to have understood it to mean the deeper, affective trust more common to Russian culture.
When collaborating, we will need both cognitive and affective trust. We will need to trust that our referral partners can do their job and we should also be open to forming deeper bonds of trust with them too. Either way, we should gather information on our partners and update our opinion as the facts change, because sometimes our trust will be misplaced.
• ‘Working with Strangers: Build your career and grow your business through referrals’ by Robert Fllint, Novaro Publishing, 15th January 2025, ISBN: 978-1-7398640-9-5. See here for further details.
