I remember sitting with a colleague a few years ago. A conversation that started about nothing in particular quickly became one of the most productive exchanges I'd had in a while: problems I'd been thinking about for a long time simply disappeared. The same pattern kept happening, over and over, with that exact person. Every time, the results were significantly better than thinking alone, even though that person didn’t have the answer either. It's not that the other person gave me the answer. In most cases, they didn't know the answer either. Something else happened: something in the structure of the exchange itself produced thinking I couldn't produce on my own. I've been trying to understand why. The dominant model of serious thinking is solitary. Deep work happens when you close the door, change your status to busy, and put on noise-cancelling headphones. Meetings are a coordination overhead. Conversation is what you do after you have already thought. This model isn't wrong about execution.…