The late 1930’s were hard years for Alex F. Osborn, one of the founders and proprietors of BBDO, a high-profile advertising agency that helped add luster to radio programming during its golden age. After increasing billings from $1 million to $20 million over two decades, and doing breakthrough work for General Electric, DuPont and Lever Brothers, BBDO suddenly lost a slew of clients and employees in 1938.

Osborn was stunned and sought answers. And, during a reflective period, he realized that his agency had ceded its creative edge. So he came up with the collaborative concept of brainstorming to gather and garner as many new ideas as possible – no matter how ridiculous or absurd they might seem at first. Sensing the urgency of his business loss, Osborn wanted every participant in these group sessions to use their brains to storm a creative problem, and he wanted them to do so “in commando fashion.” Once the ideas were on the table, Osborn said, the brainstorming participants would come together using deferred judgment to select the best thinking.

Seventy years later, BBDO can point to a long list of advertising breakthroughs as a result of its ability to brainstorm, create – and execute. Brainstorming is also a staple in many other workplaces seeking innovation today. But the debate rages on as to whether these “group gropes” really stimulate and nurture creativity. A number of critics point out that brainstorming rewards style over substance and verbal prowess over contemplative and critical analysis. In short, the age-old questions remain: what is the most productive way to interact? And what does constructive collaboration truly look – and feel – like?

We don’t have the answers to these questions yet. But we must work toward them if we want to successfully automate the knowledge economy and stimulate the world’s labor productivity growth rate.

One thing we do know, however, is that brainstorming represents just 5 percent of any project; the remaining 95 percent is the actual doing and getting things done. And that’s where constructive collaboration, productive collaboration, is really needed.

It’s also where IT is really needed. Businesses get this on an intellectual level; a recent Forrester report indicated that 70 percent of IT decision makers in companies are investing more money in messaging technology to boost collaboration and productivity.

But the problem is that the current generation of powerful IT tools and applications doesn’t allow us to collaborate productively. Behavior – as well as bits and bytes – play a role here. To put it simply and precisely, the explosion of easy-to-use technology solutions has made us excessively collaborative and increasingly less productive. We have become overly reliant on tools and applications that enable constant contact; but this chronic connection means that collaboration isn’t properly bracketed; it bleeds over into the rest of our work lives, bringing with it a steady stream of distractions and disruptions that prevent us from achieving what we need to achieve.

Good collaboration is getting together on the same page and then dispersing in order to productively work down an individual to-do list so that team goals can be accomplished.

Bad collaboration is getting together on the same page and then using technology such as instant messaging as a collaborative crutch to review, recycle and replay what happened earlier in the process.

This inability and unwillingness to smoothly convene, collaborate and then execute is the reason a number of analysts have come to the counterintuitive conclusion that productivity-enhancing IT actually leads to below-potential work.

The prime culprits are attention management issues. There are now so many digital disruptions and distractions – email, blogs, text messaging and cell phones, in addition to instant messaging, for example – that we can’t focus on results and drive toward them.

This sub-optimal work pattern has been quantified in a Hewlett-Packard study, which estimates that the average knowledge worker’s IQ drops 10 points when he or she is confronted and overwhelmed by electronic overload in the workplace.

Intel’s researchers confirm these findings and worry about the impact of work fragmentation on collaboration and productivity. Data show that the average employee at the company spends 2.5 hours each day doing email; this prevents valuable interaction that adds to the top- and bottom-lines.

Even worse, according to the Intel studies, are the interruptions. The average knowledge worker can only focus on an individual task for three minutes before a technology-induced interruption intervenes. After being interrupted, it takes a full 25 minutes for the worker to return to the task at hand – and 41 percent of the time he or she never makes it back to the task at all.

Meta-work like checking messages or organizing an inbox exacerbates the situation. According to one academic study, the typical knowledge worker spends 44 minutes a day – in chunks of 6.5 minutes – performing this sort of digital administration. These 44 minutes are expensive because they often preclude getting things done.

This isn’t the only cost, the only price we pay in the quest for enhanced productivity. In addition to lost opportunities for solid and substantial collaborative work, all the non-productive IT distractions reduce time spent on innovation and intellectual-property generation; they also increase the margin for error and push burnout and turnover rates higher.

One of the reasons productivity-enhancing IT – or is it non-productivity-enhancing IT? – is exacting such a toll on the workplace has to do with the huge expectations we’ve heaped on the technology. This isn’t completely surprising because we struggle with three basic illusions about these digital solutions each day – whether we’re at our desks or not.

The first illusion is that having unlimited access to everyone via a host of communications channels is beneficial to business and without cost. The reality, as discussed above, is that when people abuse this always-on capability it leads to an expensive lack of productivity that intrudes on the forward thrust of endeavor. Glibly typing out text messages and chattering back and forth isn’t constructive collaboration – especially if it means delaying project deliverables or reducing their quality.

The second illusion is that unfettered and open-ended communication frees us to successfully work at home. The reality is that constant digital contact has made it hard to be productive and get things done – whether we’re working at home or in the office.

The third illusion is that digital multi-tasking improves productivity. The reality is that most employees and contractors are not great at multi-tasking and become tangled up in an unproductive web of distraction and disruption.

Most employees and contractors also think that joining together in the same meeting room or on a conference call achieves very little. A recent Microsoft study confirms this. The software maker’s data show that we spend an average of 5.6 hours a week meeting despite the fact that 71 percent of those surveyed view this time as unproductive. That may explain why so many people switch their phones to mute and catch up on email during conference calls. The question is whether this bifurcation results in richer calls and more thoughtful email responses.

It’s unclear if this hostility toward collaboration will lead to a backlash. But there is a risk that knowledge workers could eventually retreat into non-collaborative communication because of the way they feel about meetings and technology that is supposed to enhance productivity.

As software developers, we need to be sensitive and aware of this possibility. The challenge for us – and for executives and managers – is to create technology and business cultures that enable both constructive collaboration and constructive implementation processes. That’s the way to automate the knowledge economy and increase and improve the world’s productivity growth.