Some practices have become so commonplace that we use them unconsciously, without even thinking about it. Forwarding an email, adding someone to a conversation, automatically inviting people to a meeting… all of these things give the impression that we are collaborating when all we are doing is shifting the problem elsewhere.
Far from the ideal of collaboration and sharing work, this is more a case of transferring mental load.
In short:
- Common actions such as forwarding an email or inviting someone to a meeting are often perceived as collaborative acts, but are in fact an unacknowledged transfer of mental load.
- The illusion of collaboration stems from delegation without clarification: the lack of explanation or framing forces the other person to fill in the gaps that you didn’t take the time to fill yourself.
- This outsourcing of cognitive effort, often unconscious, results from a culture of urgency and reactivity, where relaying becomes a substitute for thoughtful action.
- Digital tools amplify this trend by facilitating the dissemination of information without structuring the intention, blurring roles, responsibilities, and priorities.
- True collaboration involves clear alignment on context, objectives, and roles, which requires slowing down, articulating expectations, and valuing synthesis work.
Collaboration is outsourcing effort
On closer inspection, what we might call a drift in collaboration is based on a simple mechanism: we delegate the effort of understanding without, in many cases, mentioning the effort of taking action. Those who transfer or add someone to a loop do not always take the trouble to sort, summarize, ask a real question, and clearly state their intention and expectations. They send everything, and it is up to the other person to sort it out.
This outsourcing of cognitive effort is rarely conscious, but it tends to become the norm. It reflects a culture of urgency, of piling up tasks and messages, of “moving on to the next step” without taking a step back. It is also based on an unspoken assumption: in a system that values responsiveness, relaying information gives the illusion of having “taken action”.
A pathology reinforced by tools
This phenomenon did not begin with digital tools, but they have amplified it. With email, instant messaging, shared calendars, document co-editing, and now generative AI, everything is designed to simplify creation and sharing, rarely to structure intent.
You could even say that things are getting worse as technology improves. Instant messaging is not the cure for email, but the same thing only worse (Chat has replaced email, and it’s even worse), and as for the ease with which we generate documents, it makes you wonder if this activity is becoming a substitute for work (Is creating documents really work?).
But as is often the case, the problem is not the tool, but how we use it. Mentioning @everyone in a chat is sometimes useful, but it’s mostly a way of avoiding asking who is actually concerned. Automatically adding 15 people to a meeting ensures that no one is forgotten, but it doesn’t ask who needs the meeting and who the meeting is for. Generating content with AI means going faster without asking whether the content is useful, understandable, or usable. Worse, we lose awareness of the asymmetry between the time and attention required to generate information and those required to process it.
Collaboration is first and foremost about alignment
Working together is not just about sending the same message to several people, but about creating the conditions for a minimum level of alignment: on the context, each person’s role, and the objective to be achieved.
This sometimes means slowing down, explaining your intentions, asking questions, and even answering those of others. It also means restoring value to the work of synthesis and giving it the time it deserves. Summarizing a situation, offering an interpretation, providing context, and identifying points to watch out for are acts of collaboration in their own right. And they are often the ones we forget the most.
Bottom line
What we call “collaboration” deserves better than automatic responses or knee-jerk reactions. It’s not about sending more information, but about building useful interactions.
This often starts with a simple rule: if I haven’t made the effort to understand, I shouldn’t ask someone else to act.
Image credit: Image generated by artificial intelligence via ChatGPT (OpenAI)
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