The dark side of collaboration ideas

Some things meant to make our lives easier just make them further complicated. I'm thinking specifically of things around the office like open office plans and recent collaboration tools.

Open office plans where supposed to encourage cooperation among workers and ad hock meetings. However everyone I have ever worked with in one of those environments has hated it. I personally wear headphones whenever I'm in the office, even though there is a noise cancelling system over the whole floor. The white noise just grates on me, and I get distracted by conversations around me. So I listen to music all day while I work, or I work from home. I'm much more productive when I can drop the distractions of the open office cube farm.

I had an experience with Microsoft Teams recently. It wasn't great. While it is a good tool for group  communication, like Slack, it is also a document storage device which can be good if you're just trying to archive documents for others to look at, but it doesn't work well if you're actively using those files, or if they are designed around a file structure that needs to be maintained. It has taken what was a single repository of files and split it into two. That increases the chance that there will be issues with not having the right version in the right place. This has been a common occurrence with many of these products, not just Teams. Sharepoint has the same issue from what I've seen, at least from the front end. There is a way for storage to work where you can still have working and published files, but it's a old fashioned drive folder system. In the haste to use the cloud for everything we seem to be cutting off functionality.

With a lot of these collaboration ideas, I'm reminded of Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park. "You were so busy trying to figure out if you can do it, you didn't take time to think if you should." Sure you can create a world with all these collaboration ideas, but will anyone actually enjoy them and will anyone actually be made more efficient by them? That's a question that needs to be asked more often.