So is collaboration doomed to fail in the modern workplace with all these problems? Not at all! You just have to choose the right tool for the right challenge.

Here my personal take on what collaboration tool is great for what purpose.

Meetings

Meetings are a great collaboration in the following scenarios. 

1. You want to share information quickly

2. You need to delegate tasks

3. You want to hear what's everybody been up to

But they don't work well when it comes to:

1. Find solutions to complex problems as there are often no proper rules for the game

2. Involve every stakeholder as people will feel heard but not listened too

Obviously, you can facilitate meetings in a really good way. To me, such meetings are really near to what I would call workshops. When I'm talking about meetings I'm talking about the traditional meetings that are often misused in the corporate world.

Workshops

Workshops, especially workshops that used design thinking as inspiration, are a pretty nice collaboration too in the following moments.

1. Find solutions to complex problems

2. Involve every stakeholder

But they don't work well when it comes to:

1. Sharing information, then people feel there isn't enough "doing" and feel cheated

2. Delegate tasks, then workshops take too long for something that would be quicker in a traditional meeting.

There are even more ways to collaborate

In order to keep this little course short, I'll keep the comparison only to the previous types of collaboration. But now that there are more ways to collaborate in the modern workplace. For example, we could also speak of asynchronous ways of collaborating like the ones made possible with digital tools.