Ownership vs. collaboration, cooperation, working together

The culture in Nokia is to split the tasks and to name people to be responsible for them.

The unstated rationale is an effectiveness bound to the personalization of responsibilities. This culture is well-adapted when the tasks may be carried upon in large independence, or respecting a tight hierarchy of power: when I need somebody else's involvement, I can order him to perform a sub-task, myself not loosing the control over the "higher-level" context.

This effectiveness quickly degrades as the situation of communication gets more complex:

• the tasks cannot be bound in time
• some dependencies are beyond control
• the expertise is not distributed hierarchically
• the knowledge is not safely acquired before the action starts (one gets wiser as one goes)

The result of this degradation is:

• duplication of work: work is performed in parallel within different contexts, ignoring each others
• poor quality: the best experience is not available, not concentrated; the results are not guaranteed to be consistent with each other; they can be jeopardized by any new effort
• poor commitment: insecurity
• politics: people are the key to access the information and resources; effort is better spent in securing relationships than directly in the tasks.