I see collaboration as either i) two players trying to kick the same ball at the same time ii) one playing a striker and the other a goal keeper. In practical terms, collaboration is usually like ii). It's solving how to get the most people working independently yet towards the same goal. Combining different talents at different tasks has more examples in the world than generalists working on the same thing at the same time together. I suspect that at the micro-scale, creative tasks like design and decision-making can only be single-threaded because they are grown iteratively using an OODA style loop. You have to go up in scale and create larger independent tasks to parallelise them across multiple people each with their own OODA loop. You can have a team OODA loop with researchers, engineers and reviewers performing different roles within a loop which is a different slicing of macro scale work to enable independent work but it would be a productivity disaster on small scale work. An analogy for collaboration more like i) is how a stone can be too heavy for any one person to lift, but a team can lift it together. It is a single indivisible task beyond any individuals capacity. Are there creative tasks that are indivisible that we can't do without a team lifting together? Don't know. Design is effectively a global optimization problem where you need a single goal-function and the power to change any/all parameters of the design. IMHO this is why great design often comes out of only a single person's mind which is why people like Woz tell people to work alone:

Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me — they’re shy and they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone — best outside of corporate environments, best where they can control an invention’s design without a lot of other people designing it for marketing or some other committee. I don’t believe anything really revolutionary has ever been invented by committee… I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone… Not on a committee. Not on a team.”

Ageeed in principal about working alone. I’ve been a solo founder for the past year and only recently added a team member. However, more important than who’s working on the problem is how they’re working on a problem. You need awesome feedback loops to iterate in the right direction. Working alone often yields something that adds value only to the designer, with their rich domain knowledge and passion for the space. You need to make real people part of the process. It can be intense research for a few weeks, then heads down for months — many combination work here. In general I believe programming hasn’t advanced much because of this ‘solo’ and ‘alone’ mindset. Programming is so easy to iterate in quietly in a basement — you just need an outlet 4 hrs a day and food. It’s well suited for exploring dark rabbit holes and avoiding the burdens of rejections or failure. A mentor told me to make the market your co-founder. Best advice I got in the last 2 years. We’ve made 4 major iterations is 2018 and probably have 4 more to go before we make the impact we want to. Each one requires throwing out something really cool for something really useful (often in ways we hadn’t anticipated and never predicted).