“Hell is other people.” And, because work is nothing if not ironic, heaven is too. The difference between the two isn’t people, it’s the system they are in. At work and on earth this is a system we create, inhabit, and serve.

People like to work together. People like to focus. People like certainty, even when things are fluid. Certainty is a funny word. We focus on it being an infallible plan, reassuring us that everything is going to be fine. Well, it’s not going to be fine. False certainty is not good, but it’s what we get most often. (Wishful thinking is not a plan.)

So, we want certainty that, no matter what happens, our team has our backs and that we’ll respond immediately and together.

We are building new barriers to our existing lousy relationships. Remote work, asynchronous comms, and post-pandemic uncertainty can be ingredients for a communication apocalypse. Toss some AI in there and suddenly managers are like, “Well, you all couldn’t get your work done anyway, so is AI going to be any worse?”

Conway’s Law and the System We Deserve

Conway’s Law tells us that the way our teams communicate (or don’t) becomes our culture and our products embody our culture. If our communication is scattered, guarded, and bureaucratic, our products will be too. If we want to be professional, we must design ways of working that allow us to act professionally. If we value agency, transparency, and humane collaboration, we need to design how we work to underwrite that. Good relationships is heaven. Bad relationships, division, isolation, and fear are simply formalizing hell.

Bob Dylan said, “Ya gotta serve somebody.” When we work, we build our system…then we become its servants. We create the environment together and that shapes our experience. If we neglect it or assume someone will solve our problems for us, that is negligence and we will pay a price for it.

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Collaboration Is Always a System

In The Collaboration Equation, I talk about how teams don’t magically collaborate and how our negligence of our culture builds barriers to Professionalism. Professionalism isn’t doing going to work and shelving your emotions. Professionalism is being an active player in your system of work and actively designing how we operate, share information, and improve together.

My editor, Tom Ehrenfeld, made me spend a lot of time on Five Principles of Collaboration. He did this because he was part of the team and knew they were important. He was being a professional. I’m glad he did because they are relevant here. We need, more than ever, to build our businesses on a professional, collaborative foundation:

* Pay Attention (Situational Awareness): Professionals know what’s going on. They don’t operate blind.

* Give a Damn (Relationships): Value is created when people care about the outcome, the product, the customer, and each other.

* Improvement Is Your Job: (PDSA) Agency isn’t bestowed, it’s earned by fixing and maintaining a collaborative system, not just working harder.

* Information Drives Action: (Act with Confidence) Every team member needs the whole picture, in real-time, to see direction, engage in strategy, get their work done, and help the most when help is needed.

* Trust but Visualize: (Visual Leadership) Respect and trust are built when we make our work visible. Everyone can see plans, change, and needs…and then contribute.

Collaboration is the only tool humans have to avoid chaos. We replace silent participation and long meetings with the right communication and interaction when and where it’s needed. But we choose. No Exit (1944), Conway’s Law (1967), Gotta Serve Somebody (1979), Collaboration Equation(2019) nearly 80 years of the same message. By now, it is a choice we make. We choose how to communicate. We almost always hand that decision to someone else.

We need to stop that.

A Pact of Professionalism

Every meeting we have (on Zoom, in Slack, or face-to-face) is a re-negotiation our professional culture. We don’t show up to be each other’s hell or heaven. We choose. We show up to design which we’ll create, and often unintentionally add to the problems that upset us every day.

We can’t wait for managers to enforce out-of-the-box “collaboration.” We, as professionals, need to architect systems that support agency, improvement, information, and respect.

If Sartre, Dylan, or Conway show up in your dreams tonight they’ll be saying the same thing. Build your heaven together, or get ready to serve the hell your system creates.

The real collaboration equation is simple: Individuals in teams create value. Systems either amplify or crush that value.

… and for some reason the Substack UI wouldn’t let me say this was inspired by a chat with Pawel Brodzinski under the image at the top. But it was.

CALL TO ACTION: If this is interesting to you, you can hire us to help (just message me on substack or linkedin), or take a class at Modus Institute, or simply get a paid subscription to Humane Work here on substack (see above).

This is what we do and have done for decades, and what we work with others on. Simple, visual, humane strategies to fix the real problems of work.

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