I admit the title sounds bad. In a professional world where collaboration has become a moral virtue before it is a method, saying "let's collaborate as little as possible" lands about as well as saying that workshops are, every now and then, a waste of time. And yet it is exactly the strategy that delivered the INPS rebranding — and I would make the same choice again.
In the model I use to assess collaboration, that project sat in the worst quadrant: the Tug of War. Low alignment — everyone had their own idea of what the Institute's identity was — and very high competition, because visual identity was the territory where, for decades, everybody had done as they pleased.
Why it was a Tug of War
An institution with more than a century of history has a very strong gut-level identity: everyone knows what INPS is, everyone has an opinion on how it should look. That identity, though, had never been guarded by anyone — and with no guardianship, everyone felt entitled to interpret it. The example I always give: two offices of the same Institute, in the same building, adjacent doors, furnished in two completely different styles. Nobody had got it wrong: there simply was no right.
Under those conditions, collaborative tables degenerated without fail. Workshops turned into protest arenas: the discussion was about why the project was wrong, who should be leading it, how inconvenient the timing was. And collaboration itself became a tactic: asking for "one more alignment session" was the most elegant way to postpone a decision indefinitely.
The three risks of the Tug of War. Conflict paralysis: the project stalls waiting for a consensus that will never arrive. Partial adoption: to please everyone you concede something to each, and what emerges is a dysfunctional hybrid that serves no one. Delegitimisation: every conflictual meeting erodes the project's authority, until the project itself becomes "that controversial thing".
The strategy: closed doors and pre-approval
The choice was to work with a small team behind closed doors, and to bring outside only solutions that were already mature. Before anything was shown to stakeholders, it was validated by the key decision-makers — what we internally called pre-approval. Walking into a presentation with a proposal already endorsed by those with authority changes the nature of the meeting entirely: the discussion moves from whether to do it, to how to apply it. Concessions still happen, but calibrated on marginal matters, never on principles.
The operating rule that came out of it fits in five words: always inform, involve as little as possible.
Collaboration is neither a moral obligation nor an organizational spell. It is a tool — and like every tool it has a cost, a context of use, and limits.
The cost, here, was obvious: endless time, impossible decisions, and the concrete risk that the project would die before being born. In a context like that, opening a wide table hands conflict a stage.
The price to pay (and how we paid it)
Working behind closed doors carries a serious side effect: those left outside don't feel part of the project, and an identity nobody owns doesn't get adopted. We compensated on three fronts.
Constant storytelling. Recurring presentations to every structure, with the same story repeated obsessively: where we come from, where we're going, why now. Public storytelling on the Institute's own channels did the rest, making the direction visible even to those who were in no room at all.
Targeted listening, not co-creation. Key people were listened to one by one, in individual meetings. Listening doesn't mean handing over the wheel: it means gathering information, understanding where resistance is nesting, and treating people as counterparts rather than recipients of a memo.
Practical tools, lots of them. The brand manual came out in three successive forms: first as a file on the intranet, signed by the leadership — because a signature carries weight; then as a printed volume, which in the Institute's culture holds a symbolic value of representation; finally as a public portal, updatable and open to citizens too. And above all came the templates: posters, plaques, folders, letterheads, even Teams backgrounds. Dozens upon dozens of ready-made files, worth more in daily life than any guideline.
The templates were the real transmission belt of the brand: they settled the identity competition, because using the standard simply became more convenient than reinventing it.
Worth noting: innovating doesn't always require innovative tools. A printed volume and a folder of .pptx files worked better than any sophisticated platform.
When you do collaborate
None of these conclusions generalise. In the same Institute, in the same years, the Sirio design system was built with the opposite approach: community of practice, wide workshops, dozens of people involved from day one. It worked because that project sat in a different quadrant — the Relay Race: everyone agreed it was needed, nobody was interested in claiming ownership.
Same person in charge, same organization, two opposite strategies within a few months of each other. Anyone leading a change project would do well to ask which quadrant they're in before deciding how many people to invite to the table. Getting that question wrong costs months — and sometimes the whole project.