“Collaboration” is one of those overused words, so much so that we’ve watered down its subtle differences in meaning. This is especially true for the workplace design community.
In many ways, the word has become generic, and now that it has emerged as a key driver of the knowledge economy, we don’t have a good way to describe all of its nuances. It’s like the word “snow”: most of us think of it as frozen precipitation. But Eskimos? They’ve got 50 different words to describe it. Collaboration is a lot like that, except we don’t have 50 ways of looking at it, which makes it particularly hard to write about.