What fascinates me is that the idea is not really a novel finding, plenty of people are making the same observation. What's strange is that the conversation always stops there... nobody seems to ask the harder question: management is a skill that took most of us years to learn badly before we got decent at it. "Welcome to our world" is not giving any help.
Hey, I am the author of the article. Happy to hear that it works well for you. I have been personally where you are only in office environment, and fair point, it does and can happen that things work smoothly.
That said, I have seen it more not working than working. I think it depends a lot on the environment and conditions that people are working/operating, for example we are a relatively newly formed team (90% of the team joined within last 10-12 months), and we definitely see the outlined problems more, while we learn how it is to work together.
While it’s a bit early to make right conclusions, we already have some learnings and outcomes. We do see increase in overall happiness and mood in the team, knowledge is shared more effectively and we started slowly to break silos. Another interesting side-effect seems to be that regardless people collaborate on particular problem or not, disagreements somehow got easier to resolve, as we understand each other better.
Another interesting change is that we need less synch meetings.
So far the biggest challenge is respecting individuals preferences, as the more people collaborate together, the more it becomes implicit expectation, whereas not everyone wants to do it, or some days you want some others not. So making sure that we don’t get pulled to any extreme is very important. Time zone differences is another challenge, sometimes because energy level really differs and its hard to find the harmony working together.