If we are trying to picture the kind of office where there is lots of fruitful collaboration going on, we might imagine everyone getting on pretty well: meetings with lots of agreement and shared insights; perhaps we might even picture some backslapping and the odd high five. We tend to associate collabora- tion with harmony.
As a result of this delusion, we can end up behaving in some rather passive ways. We might notice that our colleagues have got something not quite right. Perhaps we feel they have neglected a possible market segment by pitching the product too narrowly, or perhaps they haven’t realised that our competitors are doing a rather similar thing for their latest campaign, or we simply might have a better idea than our manager about what should go in the monthly sales report.
