Collaboration Engineering is an approach to create sustained collaboration support by designing collaborative work practices for high-value recurring tasks, and transferring those designs to practitioners to execute for themselves without ongoing support from collaboration professionals. A key assumption in this approach is that we can predictably design collaboration processes. In this paper we explore this assumption to understand whether collaboration can, in fact, be designed, and elaborate on the role of thinkLets in the engineering of collaborative work practices. ThinkLets are design patterns for collaborative interactions.