We spent this past weekend in South Beach, a place I like to visit for its Otherness—its contrast to my Typical Everyday in New York. Replace gummed-up concrete with powdery sand, blaring sirens with the dry rustling of palm trees, tall soy lattes with piña coladas. But perhaps the most striking difference is The Crowd, with its unfamiliar mix of tawny locals and lobster-red tourists. The transience of the city is not lost on me—I find the anonymity, the autonomy, and perhaps, to some extent, the misguided assumption that I have nothing in common with those around me oddly liberating.

I’ve spent a large percentage of my career as a soloist, whether that’s meant working as a freelance designer or maintaining a practice for several years with a business partner whose skills differed greatly from my own. Throughout the years, I became complacent and accustomed to being a DIY-er—alternately a designer, writer, headhunter, photographer, production traffic coordinator, IT, account manager, and admin. But since joining IDEO nearly three years ago, I’ve had to completely rethink my approach to what it takes to make great work. I’ve learned a lot about how much I don’t know by engaging with some of the smartest, talented, and most insightful people I’ve ever encountered at work, or In Life, for that matter. I’ve experienced the Power of Collaboration, and have seen first-hand how it can lead to richer ideas and greater outcomes. But at the same time, I’ve often wondered about the perils and long-term impacts collaboration may have on us as individuals and as, for lack of a better word, auteurs. It’s easy to understand how collaboration can be crippling. It has an unnerving way of working its psychological voodoo on us—we suddenly see limits to our own abilities where we previously saw none. We become co-dependent on those we feel possess more credible licenses to practice. But the one question that continues to needle me is: can frequent collaboration lead to intellectual laziness? Can it actually be making us stupid?

As part of my ongoing education in Social Media, I recently picked up a copy of Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler’s book, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives. The authors present startling evidence that suggests our real-life networks wield remarkable influence over every aspect of our lives from the contagion of emotions to eating disorders to seemingly “random” acts of kindness. One of the passages that I found most enlightening was:

“…if people make decisions in sequence and are aware of prior decisions, if information moves from one person to the next (as in the game of telephone) we can end up with the blind leading the blind. Once a critical mass of people make a decision, the rest of the group goes along, reasoning that others cannot all be wrong. […] So whether the wisdom of crowds can be trusted may depend on whether the members interact concurrently and independently or sequentially and interdependently.”

So while it may feel that we’re exercising Free Will, it seems that our thoughts, emotions, and opinions are largely governed by those of others. There are obviously a number of factors at play in these collaborative moments, including who our partners are and the context in which the exchange occurs. We’ve all found ourselves in rooms where He with the Loudest Voice trumps all, or times where we’ve self-censored an unpopular opinion due to any number of factors. Perhaps the timing was wrong, the culture wasn’t welcoming, or because our intuition was telling us that this was not The Battle. And while it’s worth having increased awareness around how these aspects affect our own (and others’) behavior, it’s probably also worth exploring what we can do to ensure that our own ideas, points of view, and perspectives aren’t subjugated to the foot stomp of The Crowd without good reason. We should be mindful of how collaboration will best serve our needs: is this a generative or evaluative moment? We can avoid Death by Air Crit by committing to our vision; designing it, writing it down, and making it tangible and evident will only help to clarify our intentions (and make it equally difficult for us to disown it later). And lastly, we should exercise our judgment when synthesizing inputs. We were all born with instincts for a reason.