---
title: The Power of Knowing Together (1) — Nothing Can Be Done Alone
url: https://oosioo.com/en/p/%ED%95%A8%EA%BB%98-%EC%95%84%EB%8A%94-%ED%9E%98-1
date: 2026-10-15T10:22:37+00:00
author: SYSOP
summary: A company is a place where people gather to work. So why does someone always end up freeloading, the way it happens in a group project? This is a story about sharing that starts from the fact that no one can do anything alone.
---
# The Power of Knowing Together (1) — Nothing Can Be Done Alone

Following the piece on how to give first, this time I want to talk about knowing things together. It's about going beyond simply forming relationships, to sharing information and goals with the people you work with.

The Korean word for company is hoesa (會社). Broken down into its Chinese characters, it means "gathering" and "association." A place where people gather to work. It sounds obvious, but not many places actually live out this simple meaning. Let me start with the conclusion. A person can't do anything alone. In the end, you have to work with someone, and some things have to be entrusted to others. But if the people you work with don't understand the situation as well as you do, that collaboration is bound to fail.

## The memory of group projects

If you've ever done a group project, you know. Most people aren't that cooperative. Someone freeloads, someone else ends up carrying the whole thing alone. The night before the presentation, someone posts "I didn't get my part done, what do I do," and one or two people pull an all-nighter while the rest just put their names on it. Companies aren't fundamentally different. You have to work with colleagues, clients, partners, and sometimes even competitors, and quite a few of them aren't so different from the people you met in that group project.

## Why more hands make people lazier

This isn't because people are bad. There's an old experiment on this. If the force one person exerts pulling a rope alone is 100, with two people it drops to 93 per person, with three it falls to 85, and with eight people pulling together it drops to as low as 49, barely half. The more hands there are, the lazier each hand gets. Later research found the cause: the feeling that "it doesn't have to be me," in other words, a drop in motivation. This is called social loafing.

![A bar chart of the Ringelmann effect, showing per-person force in a tug-of-war dropping from 100 to 77 to 49 as the number of participants increases](/uploads/53b27bf81d89849a.webp =720)

| People pulling together | Force per person |
|---|---|
| 1 | 100 |
| 4 | 77 |
| 8 | 49 |

What's interesting is that this laziness disappears under one condition. In the same line of research, when each person's individual force was measured separately and reported back to them, the per-person force rose again. When their share wasn't visible, people quietly eased off; the moment their share became visible, they pushed again. Freeloading doesn't happen because people are lazy — it happens because there's somewhere to hide.

Going back to the group project, the answer becomes clear. When the group leader visibly divides roles — "A does this part, B does that part" — and the group checks progress together, freeloading drops noticeably compared to when everyone is simply told to "figure it out on your own" with no further word. No one can hide. It isn't surveillance but transparency that reduces laziness.

So how do you get people to move together actively? The answer is surprisingly simple. Let them know why they need to do it. Group projects fail not because people lack ability, but because they don't know why they're doing it. No goal means no motivation, and no motivation means freeloading. And that starts with sharing information.

In the next piece, I'll start by talking about why so many people hold on tightly to that information.