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.