3 posts tagged with "Collaboration"

I walked up to someone's desk last month. Asked about a decision their team had made — something I needed context on before a planning conversation. They stopped what they were doing, turned around, and walked me through the reasoning. Four minutes. Problem solved.

Two weeks later, same person, same kind of question. I sent it on Slack. Clean message. Tagged them. Even added context about what I'd already tried. Read receipt appeared. Then... nothing. Three hours later, a thumbs-up emoji. No answer.

I don't think they became a worse person between those two interactions. I think the environment changed, and the environment was doing more heavy lifting than either of us realised.

Now — here's the less flattering reading I have to be honest about. When I walked up to their desk, I removed their option to defer. They couldn't not-respond to a face standing in front of them. Maybe what I'm calling "cooperation triggered by presence" is partly just... politeness coercion? The inability to say "not now" to a body in your space? I don't know. I think both things are true simultaneously — presence genuinely activates empathy and it removes the escape hatch. I'm going to explore the presence side here because I find it more interesting, but I want to name the other thing too.

You know the feeling. Your team's retros are positive. Velocity is stable. People genuinely like working together. Psych safety is high — folks admit mistakes, ask dumb questions, challenge each other without it getting weird. By every internal measure, you're a healthy, high-performing team.

And yet.

Every dependency is a nightmare. Every cross-team interaction feels like pulling teeth. You're waiting three weeks for a PR review from another squad. Their API keeps breaking yours. Planning sessions with them feel like hostage negotiations. And the conclusion your team reaches — naturally, inevitably — is: "We're fine. It's them."

I've been in this room. Multiple times. On both sides of it. And I've come to believe that this specific pattern — a team that feels healthy internally but generates friction at every boundary — is one of the most dangerous failure modes in engineering orgs. Not because it's dramatic, but because it's invisible. The team genuinely is healthy by local measures. That's what makes it so hard to diagnose.

I've started calling this the insular health fallacy — the belief that internal team health equals systemic health. The team isn't broken. The interface is broken. But from inside, it looks like everyone else is the problem.

Social psychology has a name for the underlying mechanism: in-group bias. The minimal group experiments in the 1970s showed that people will favour their own group — even when the groups are assigned randomly. Give people a label, any label, and they'll start preferring "us" over "them." Now imagine what happens when "us" is a team that's genuinely built trust, shared context, and psychological safety over months or years. The in-group cohesion becomes a fortress. And fortresses, by design, keep people out.

You send a Slack message to another team. It's a reasonable request — a small API change, maybe a code review, maybe just a question about how their service handles edge cases. You write it clearly. You tag the right person. You even add a polite emoji. And then... nothing. No reply. No acknowledgment. Just the quiet hum of a message marked as read and promptly ignored.

You're not being ghosted because they're bad people. You're being ghosted because the game they're playing rewards ignoring you.

This isn't a people problem. It's a math problem.