by keeganpoppen | 2025-11-11 22:30:43+00:00
it's funny because the facile sportsball analogy actually fails horribly here. "playing together more" is the absolute last thing that the undifferentiated mass of hundreds of people hitting the like button on a random nonsensical comment need to do more of. the only situation where collaboration of this sort is productive is when you cannot reasonably expect any other participants to have some sort of proprietary knowledge over their domain. think contestants on Survivor trying to put a puzzle together faster than the other team to get an immunity idol, not "i'm gonna mansplain Calculus to Terence Tao".

and man i wish i could go back in time to when i merely thought the "Globetrotters vs Lakers" thing was just a ham-fisted phrasing some sentiment along the lines of "the Lakers are better than the Globetrotters"...

but, unfortunately, i "took one for the team" (read: "collaborated with the team"), and am now dumbstruck as to what could possibly have been meant by this metaphor. for those of you who have yet on this fine day to regret the dual, magical gifts of sight and literacy: apparently the Globetrotters and Lakers played an exhibition match of some sort in 1948. the Globetrotters won 61-59. and it was apparently some sort of watershed moment in America's collective realization that Black people are actually also good at basketball. i wish this was merely my being grouchy, glib, and reductive. but just read the Wikipedia article: that is literally what happened and what it meant. in historical context. that, and nothing more, is the object lesson so signified.

so, now that i have made peace with my dual inabilities to magically unread and unlearn, pray tell: who are the metaphorical Black athletes being discriminated against, metaphorically, in this... metaphor? is the implication that Tammy from HR or Chad the BizDev Bro are better designers than Klaus from the Bauhaus? is it that the Lakers "played together less" than the Globetrotters? surely it can't be that there was a giant societal misapprehension (read: racism) that caused people to systematically misevaluate talent and, as sports experts as you say, pass the wrong people the ball? if only the Lakers had collaborated more, they could have overcome their systematic racism that blinded them to the basketball nous of their fellow man! now that would have made a great sports movie. for 1948. because otherwise it sure seems like it is not only an argument in favor of the most abjectly banal-at-best-and-insidious-at-worst flavor at the Baskin Robbins of collaboration. "French Vanilla" collaboration, as it were. But whereas Vanilla at least has a certain je nais se quois in its blandness-- a certain out-of-fashion purity not too dissimlar from how even a now-octogenarian would view that barely-contemporaneous time and episode— this canvas is painted with subtractive colors, producing a tastes-worse-than-even-its-shitly-pallor-would-suggest goulash.

anyway, so back to basketball. the point of "playing together more" isn't so that the 7'2" defensive savant who can't pass nor make a basket from further than 5 feet away from the rim gets more touches at the top of the key. it's so that everyone from the stars to the role players know exactly what their job is and, CRUCIALLY, what it isn't. if you can't shoot and can't dribble at the level of an all-conference Point Guard, go stand in the dunker spot or set a screen or both. literally anyone who isn't a top 25 point guard in the NBA cannot be trusted to dribble more than three times without dribbling off their foot and turning it over. and there's no shame in that: Klay Thompson scored 60 points in a game while dribbling a grand total of 11 times.

collaboration of the kind the OP describes, and somewhere between endemic and pandemic in the corp-o-collab-o-sphere isn't of the "oh wow that Capital Markets person we hired is actually even better at UX than at their real job" variety. it's a bunch of people just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks with absolutely no context and nary a second thought. because why should they? it's not impossible that there's a Good Will Hunting out there cleaning off the whiteboards and wiping down the Kombucha kegerator; to condescend that it is at all likely to bear fruit is the height of arrogance. wouldn't have been a very compelling movie, otherwise.

and yet your contention is that it's not that these people have too much time on their hands, it's that they don't have enough! pull aside your friendly neighborhood designer sometime and ask how thankful they are that everyone seems to have opinions on design because people seem to think that having eyes and a mouth are the only prerequisite qualifications for being a designer. good design collaboration: "hmm i think the font sizes between these views are a bit inconsistent". bad design collaboration: "hmmm... i think it just needs to 'pop' more".

high-performing collaboration looks like Watson and Crick, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, or The Beatles. not design by committee-of-people-who-have-no-particular-insight-and-don't-even-care-they-just-want-to-be-seen-to-be-collaborative. There is a specter haunting corporate america-- the specter of conspicuous collaboration.