Single Player Mode

I had a conversation recently with a senior design leader at a tech company. They build complex software products for a regulated industry—smart team, technical environment. We were talking about what I do; the kind of workshops and facilitation I run to help teams work together better. And he said something that's been sitting with me ever since.

He told me his team were, without really noticing it, slipping into what he called single player mode.

Here's what that looks like. Someone encounters a problem. Instead of bringing it to the team, they disappear with it. They use AI to research it, frame it, prototype a solution; sometimes they build the whole thing. Then they come back and say, look what I made. And it's impressive. It works. But somewhere in that process, something got lost.

What got lost was the conversation that should have happened along the way.

Not long ago, solving a complex problem required a kind of enforced collaboration. You needed a developer to tell you what was and wasn't possible. You needed a designer to push back on your assumptions. You needed people who held different parts of the picture to sit in a room together and work it out. That friction wasn't an obstacle to progress; it was the thinking itself. When a developer said "we can't really do it like that, what if we approached it this way instead," they weren't slowing you down. They were reframing the problem. They were making the solution better.

That kind of collaboration was never a deliberate choice most teams made. It was just what the work required. The tools forced it.

AI is changing that. Not by making people worse at their jobs—quite the opposite. It's making individuals extraordinarily capable. Someone who would previously have needed three or four colleagues to take an idea from concept to prototype can now do it largely alone. That's genuinely remarkable. But when you remove the need for collaboration, you also remove the collaboration itself. And with it, you lose all the thinking that collaboration was quietly doing.

This is the paradox the senior design leader was sitting with. His team were individually more capable than ever. Collectively, they were becoming less thoughtful. Problems were being solved in isolation, with fewer perspectives brought to bear, fewer moments where someone would ask the question that reframes everything.

Single player mode is efficient. It's just not very good at finding the right answer.

What this points to is something I think we're only beginning to reckon with. For most of the history of how teams work, collaboration was structural. It was baked into the process because the process required it. You had to bring people together to get anything done; the work itself generated the conditions for collective thinking.

That's shifting. And what it means is that collaboration is becoming a choice—which means it's becoming a skill. Something you have to design for, practice, and get intentional about. Not something you just acquire by being in a team, because being in a team no longer automatically creates the conditions for it.

This is new territory. Most organisations aren't really prepared for it. And most of the tools and frameworks we have for thinking about teamwork were built for a world where the structural conditions for collaboration still held.

I think what comes next is a generation of teams who have to learn, deliberately, how to think together. Not just how to share information or divide up tasks, but how to genuinely pool their perspectives on a problem; how to create moments of productive friction; how to build the kind of shared understanding that used to emerge naturally from the back-and-forth of getting things done.

That's not a soft skill. It's a capability that will increasingly separate teams who are good from teams who are exceptional.

The conversation I had was meant to be about what I offer. It turned into something more interesting—a reminder that the problems I've always found most compelling, getting groups unstuck, helping people see what they've stopped seeing, creating conditions for genuine collective thinking—those problems aren't going away. If anything, they're becoming more urgent.

We built work around the assumption that collaboration would take care of itself. It won't anymore. Now we have to take care of it. We have to consciously switch to multiplayer mode—and learn, properly, how to play.