Dislocated versus Co-Located Team Members

We could consider reducing the distance of communication between team members themselves as another way forward in decreasing cognitive load. Specifically, this could be done by avoiding spreading team members of a single team across different locations and, especially, time zones.

Dispersed team members will have scattered knowledge, making it difficult to establish the mutual understanding that enables proper team task completion. When distance is reduced, the cost of communication becomes lower, which incentivizes a team to communicate more. When the cost of communication is high, teams tend to reduce knowledge sharing. See “The mutual knowledge problem and its consequences for dispersed collaboration”: https://www.jimelwood.net/students/grips/man_group_comm/cramton_2001.pdf

The consequences? A reduction in collaboration between team members and across teams due to the cost and extra cognitive load of managing remote collaboration. This leads to individual and team ownership of work instead of shared ownership.

We acknowledge that current tooling and technology makes things easier for people to work remotely and collaborate (digital whiteboards, video call tooling, virtual offices…). It can make things work, but not yet as effectively as in-person collaboration does. From experience, we observe that in-person collaboration—sharing the workspace, coffee machine, lunch space, etc.—makes things smoother and more effective, even today (Feb 2026). The collaborative online tools and practices do help a lot, but these are accompanied with significant cost. The good tools are not cheap and teams still need to spend significantly more effort in good collaboration compared to just being in the same physical space. The extra cost of making it work remotely might reduce willingness and endurance to collaborate across the boundaries of the individual, and, as is observed more frequently, the team. Hence, there is a tendency to avoid collaboration by preferring asynchronous coordination and adoption of per team ownership Organizational Design Pattern 1—Technical Ownership, as well as all its consequences.

We notice that more and more product development groups are becoming aware of this problem and heavily invest in more collaborative digital tools and hybrid collaborative practices. A common hybrid practice is to frequently enough still bring everyone to the office for collaborative activities, and the rest of the time they would work remotely. This clearly has a positive impact on knowledge sharing,