The Fly and the Ox

I maintain a love hate relationship with collaborative projects. Whether a school assignment, a planning committee or a task at work the prospect of working together instills either excitement or dread, and sometimes both. When good fortune strikes, each member of the team brings a necessary and complementary skill to the job at hand. Unless you work at Google, or some other mythical institution, better odds suggest that only a few members will fully engage to ensure a quality project on the back end.

Sad experience suggests that as long as there are sufficient people who really want to do well, those select few will form a core that makes certain each task is finalized, even if they have to do it themselves. At the end of the day it becomes the team who receives the credit. Congratulations are received all around, regardless of the proportionality of the effort. At work this can really be irksome and economically unfair.

When I was in school the mere suggestion of a group project would drive me absolutely crazy and up the wall. If you have to ask why, you might have been one of the people riding the coat tails of the ones doing all the work. The worst part of school group projects stemmed from the decision by educators to designate the groups rather than allowing students the chance to form their own groups. I suppose that good pedagogy directs teachers to pair up students so that the best and the brightest do not all end up together leaving others, less scholastically sophisticated to fend for themselves.

Teaching theories aside, personal experience proved that I enjoyed collaboration more, when I got to choose my partners. If they slacked off I had not one to blame but myself. So all of this griping aside, the ability to work on collaborative documents across the cloud is one of the coolest things that I have ever encountered. I use them in almost every aspect of what I do. I promote collaboration with family, friends, coworkers and anyone else who doesn't even care. I love the ability to work on the same project simultaneously, avoiding duplication and realizing a synergistic boon.

I considered this love hate relationship in a new light when I came across a beautiful six-word Spanish idiomatic expression. This saying completely captures the description of a team where one or more individuals take the credit for the efforts and cooperation of others. Simply imagine the work that was involved in centuries past in order to prepare the land for farming. The task was so big that humans used the assistance of oxen to get the work done. Otherwise it may not have gotten done. It's bad enough when the farmer comes home and says to his wife that he's plowed the field. But lazy collaborators inspired the following assertion:

"Aramos," dijo la mosca al buey.

Translated that means, "We are plowing," said the fly to the ox.
Please don't be the fly.