An anti-pattern I’ve been noticing more recently is an individual trying to use frameworks and canvases intended for collaborative work solo (in UX, dev, product, research, whatever…) — and failing.
- The person who says “I just need to fill out the Canvas” rather than getting their views challenged by others.
- The person who sets OKRs “for” rather than “with” their team/department/organisation.
- The person who builds an opportunity solution tree by themselves, and misses a stack of risks and opportunities.
- The person who does the user story mapping exercise solo, and misses all the non-obvious stress-cases.
- The person who does a kind of “collaboration washing” by misrepresenting a solo-produced artefact as the result of a team or group’s thinking.
- … and so on …
This is something I’ve noticed before — but I’m noticing it more frequently. People I work with are dealing with the fallout from this behaviour this more often. Especially with folk confusing asking an LLM to produce an artefact with collaboration.
Would they be working solo anyway? Is the work environment encouraging them to work by themselves more? Does the structure and apparent clarity of the framework make it easier for them to fall in an antipattern? Are their fewer opportunities for collaboration?
Can we design stuff to make these problems less likely?
Something to think about more.
TL;DR: Some people seem to miss that collaborative tools lose their value when used by one person.
ttfn.
