Reframing the Question
Collaboration is rarely treated as a governance problem. In most organisational discourse, it appears as a relational skill, something that can be trained, incentivised, or improved through better team dynamics and communication workshops. When programmes fail, collaboration is invoked as the missing ingredient: if only people had communicated better, trusted each other more, aligned their expectations earlier.
This framing is not wrong. But it is incomplete, and its incompleteness has consequences.
When collaboration is reduced to a relational competency, the structural conditions that make or break collective action remain invisible. The question shifts from « what governance architecture enables or forecloses collaboration? » to « how do we get people to work better together? » A subtle but decisive displacement that moves responsibility from structures to individuals, and from governance to behaviour.
The fifth edition of the PMI Standard for Program Management (2024) signals something different. By recognising collaboration as one of six performance domains, alongside Strategic Alignment, Benefits Management, Stakeholder Engagement, Governance, and Life Cycle Management, it implicitly acknowledges that collaboration is not an interpersonal add-on to programme management. It is a structural condition of programme performance. Significantly, the Standard positions Collaboration as the domain through which all other performance domains are optimised, not one domain among equals, but the integrative dimension that makes the others function.
The Standard goes further. It asserts that « Trust is the foundation of effective collaboration in program management » (PMI, 2024, p. 56). It also links the erosion of trust to the absence of transparency, noting that « Without the requisite levels of trust, any collaboration is susceptible to failure » (PMI, 2024, p. 133, §3.7.1.4). Finally, in its discussion of culture, it warns that when organisations exhibit information silos, lack of transparency, or resistance to trust-based communication, collaboration may become « merely ceremonial and procedural » (PMI, 2024, p. 134, §3.7.1.6).
These are governance statements. Yet the Standard stops short of asking the harder question: what organisational and communicational conditions must be in place for trust to function as a genuine infrastructure, rather than a formal expectation that names the problem without analysing it?
That is the question this article pursues.
Drawing on communication theory, Luhmann’s sociology of trust, and an Ubuntu by Design framework, it argues that collaboration in complex programmes is fundamentally a governance problem, one that becomes more acute, not less, as organisational life grows increasingly mediated by digital platforms, automated workflows, and AI systems.
Collaboration as a Communicational Regime
From an Information and Communication Sciences (ICS) perspective, collaboration is never simply a matter of people working together. It is a communicational regime, a structured set of conditions that determines what information circulates, in what form, with what authority, and whose voice is recognised as legitimate in the process.
This distinction matters. A governance framework, a decision-making protocol, or a stakeholder engagement plan are not neutral containers through which collaboration flows. They are themselves communicational devices. They shape what can be said, who can say it, and what counts as a valid contribution to collective action. When we ask whether a programme is « collaborative, » we are not only asking about the quality of interpersonal relationships. We are asking about the architecture of meaning-making that the programme has installed.
The French scholar in Information and Communication Sciences Yves Jeanneret’s concept of trivialité illuminates this dynamic. For Jeanneret, every mediating device, whether a printing press, a digital platform, or an organisational procedure, does not simply transmit meaning. It transforms it. As ideas, decisions, and knowledge circulate through different social and technical spaces, they are selected, stabilised, and redistributed according to the logic of the medium through which they pass. Collaboration, understood through this lens, is not a transparent exchange of intentions. It is a process of continuous transformation in which meaning is reconfigured at every point of mediation.
This has concrete implications for programme management. When a programme installs a collaboration platform, deploys a shared reporting dashboard, or standardises its communication protocols, it is not merely providing tools for coordination. It is reconfiguring the communicational regime of the programme, determining which voices are amplified, which perspectives are rendered visible, and which forms of knowledge are recognised as actionable.
The PMI Standard implicitly acknowledges this when it identifies culture, transparency, and consultation as critical factors in collaboration. The Standard notes that when organisations exhibit information silos or resistance to trust-based communication, collaboration becomes « merely ceremonial and procedural » (PMI, 2024, p. 134, §3.7.1.6). This is a communicational diagnosis, not a technical one. It points to a breakdown not in tools or processes, but in the conditions under which meaning can circulate freely and collective action can be sustained.
What the Standard does not fully address, however, is why these breakdowns occur, and what structural forces produce them. Culture is identified as « the single most important factor influencing the effectiveness of the collaborative process » (PMI, 2024, p. 134, §3.7.1.6), but culture itself is treated as a given to be managed rather than as a product of governance architectures, power relations, and communicational choices.
This is where a communication theory of collaboration becomes necessary. Collaboration fails not because people lack goodwill, but because the structures through which they communicate, the regimes they inhabit, foreclose certain forms of expression, recognition, and collective sense-making. Understanding collaboration as a communicational regime means asking not « are people communicating? » but « what are the structural conditions under which communication, and therefore collective action, becomes possible? »
Trust as Infrastructure, Not Virtue
The PMI Standard’s assertion that trust is the foundation of effective collaboration is, as we have seen, a governance statement. But it remains undertheorised. Trust is presented as a desirable condition to be cultivated through leadership, transparency, and empathy, a relational achievement that good programme managers should pursue. What this framing misses is the structural dimension of trust: how it is produced, how it circulates, and what makes it possible or impossible in the first place.
Niklas Luhmann’s sociology of trust offers a more rigorous account. In Trust and Power (1979), Luhmann argues that trust is not primarily a moral quality or an interpersonal achievement. It is a functional mechanism, a means of reducing the complexity of social systems sufficiently to allow action. Without trust, every decision would require complete information about every possible outcome. Social life, and by extension organisational life, would become paralysed by uncertainty. Trust is what allows actors to proceed despite incomplete knowledge, to commit to courses of action whose outcomes remain open.
This reframing has important consequences. If trust is a mechanism for managing complexity rather than a virtue to be demonstrated, then it cannot be produced simply by encouraging leaders to behave with integrity or by promoting a culture of openness. It must be structurally supported, by governance architectures that make information accessible, by decision-making processes that are legible to those they affect, and by communication structures that allow disagreement to surface without threatening the collaborative relationship itself.
Luhmann also draws a crucial distinction between different forms of trust. Personal trust is grounded in familiarity with a specific individual. System trust is grounded in confidence in institutions, rules, and procedures. In complex programmes, where actors may never interact directly and where decisions affect people across multiple organisational boundaries, personal trust is insufficient. What is required is system trust, and system trust depends entirely on the quality of the governance structures through which the programme operates.
This is where power enters the analysis. Trust, for Luhmann, is never independent of power relations. It circulates along the architectures of decision, information, and recognition that structure organisations, which means that those who control those architectures also control the conditions under which trust is possible. A governance structure that concentrates decision-making authority, restricts information flows, or fails to provide legitimate channels for dissent does not merely reduce transparency. It structurally undermines the conditions under which trust, and therefore collaboration, can function.
The PMI Standard touches on this when it warns that « Representation in the collaborative process may be dependent upon influence and power, rather than participation and empowerment » (PMI, 2024, p. 134, §3.7.1.6). But it does not draw the full implication: that power asymmetries are not simply a cultural problem to be managed through better leadership. They are a governance problem, embedded in the structures through which collaboration is organised and mediated.
This insight becomes especially urgent in the context of contemporary organisations, where collaboration is increasingly not mediated by human governance structures alone, but by digital platforms, automated workflows, and AI systems. When the architecture of collaboration becomes technical, the question of who controls that architecture, and what communicational regime it installs, becomes a question of governance in the most fundamental sense.
When Collaboration Becomes Technically Mediated
The governance problem that Luhmann’s framework identifies, that trust depends on the architectures through which information circulates, decisions are made, and voices are recognised, takes on a new and more acute dimension in contemporary organisations. Collaboration is no longer mediated solely by human governance structures. It is increasingly mediated by technical ones: project management platforms, automated reporting systems, shared dashboards, asynchronous communication tools, and, more recently, AI-assisted workflows that summarise meetings, draft communications, prioritise tasks, and evaluate performance.
These systems are not neutral conduits for collaboration. They are, in the terms established in the previous section, communicational regimes, and they install their own logic of what circulates, who is recognised, and what counts as a valid contribution to collective action.
Consider what happens when a programme team adopts an AI system to summarise meeting outputs and generate action items. The system does not simply record what was said. It selects, prioritises, and reformats, according to patterns derived from training data that encode particular assumptions about what constitutes relevant information, whose contributions are salient, and what forms of knowledge are actionable. The tacit dimensions of the conversation, the hesitations, the dissenting voices, the relational tensions that shape collective understanding, are systematically filtered out. What remains is a standardised output that presents itself as a neutral record of collective decision-making, while concealing the communicational choices that produced it.
This dynamic has direct implications for trust. If, as Luhmann argues, system trust depends on the legibility of the governance structures through which a programme operates, then the opacity of algorithmic mediation constitutes a structural threat to that trust. When programme participants cannot understand how decisions are being shaped, whose voice is being amplified, and what is being lost in the translation from human interaction to platform output, the conditions for system trust are undermined, not through any individual failure of leadership or integrity, but through the architecture of the system itself.
Recent empirical research suggests this concern is well-founded. Tounkara, Labour, and Abba (2026), in When GenAI Meets Ubuntu: Road-Testing Qualitative Interviewing with LLMs (forthcoming), assessed three large language models, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, through an Ubuntu ethical framework. Their forthcoming study points to a recurrent structural pattern: while values such as Respect-Dignity and Compassion were relatively well represented across all three models, Solidarity, the recognition of collective interdependence and mutual obligation, was systematically marginalised in all three communicational regimes. This pattern reflects a deeper tendency of digital environments to individualise social experience, privileging personal performance and discrete outputs over collective bonds and shared vulnerability.
The implications for programme collaboration are significant. If the AI systems that increasingly mediate programme communication structurally marginalise solidarity, they are not simply producing imperfect outputs. They are reconfiguring the communicational regime of the programme in ways that undermine the very relational conditions on which effective collaboration depends. A programme that relies on AI-mediated communication to coordinate its teams, manage its stakeholder relationships, and generate its collective intelligence is not simply adopting a productivity tool. It is installing a governance architecture, one whose communicational logic may be fundamentally at odds with the conditions that the PMI Standard itself identifies as foundational to collaborative performance.
This is the governance problem that current frameworks, including the PMI Standard, do not yet fully address. Recognising collaboration as a performance domain is necessary. But it is insufficient if the technical systems through which collaboration is mediated remain outside the scope of governance analysis. The question is not only « are our teams collaborating effectively? » It is « what communicational regime have we installed, and what kind of collaboration does it make possible? »
What Ubuntu by Design Reveals
The frameworks currently available to programme managers, including the PMI Standard, are not wrong. They identify the right problems: trust, transparency, culture, engagement, psychological safety. But they remain within a managerial logic that treats these conditions as outcomes to be achieved through better leadership, clearer processes, and more intentional communication. What they do not provide is a framework for evaluating the structural and communicational conditions under which collaboration becomes genuinely possible, or systematically foreclosed.
This is what Ubuntu by Design offers. I use Ubuntu by Design to refer to an evaluative lens that examines whether organisational systems preserve or erode the relational conditions of collective life, drawing on the relational ontology of Ubuntu to assess the communicational and ethical dimensions of governance architectures.
Ubuntu by Design is not a cultural reference or a motivational philosophy. It is an analytical framework grounded in ubuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, a person is a person through other persons, applied as a rigorous evaluative lens to the design of organisational systems, governance architectures, and communicational regimes. Where conventional frameworks ask « is this system effective? », Ubuntu by Design asks « does this system make collective interdependence visible, or does it individualise performance and dissolve the relational conditions on which collaboration depends? »
Applied to the governance of collaboration in complex programmes, Ubuntu by Design generates three diagnostic questions that conventional frameworks do not ask.
Does this governance structure make collective interdependence visible, or does it reduce programme performance to the aggregation of individual outputs? Systems that measure, report, and reward individual contributions without accounting for the relational work that makes those contributions possible structurally undermine the collaborative fabric of the programme.
Does this communicational architecture allow dissent to circulate, or does it silence it structurally? Collaboration that cannot accommodate disagreement is not collaboration. It is conformity organised at scale. Governance structures that restrict the legitimate expression of divergent perspectives do not protect the programme from conflict. They suppress the signals that would allow the programme to adapt.
What kind of trust does this system make possible, and what kind does it foreclose? As Luhmann’s framework makes clear, system trust depends on the legibility and fairness of the structures through which a programme operates. When those structures become opaque, whether through organisational complexity or algorithmic mediation, the conditions for trust erode, and collaboration becomes, in the Standard’s own words, merely ceremonial and procedural.
These questions do not replace the governance frameworks that programme managers already use. They extend them, into the communicational and relational dimensions that those frameworks acknowledge but do not fully theorise. In environments where collaboration is increasingly mediated by digital systems whose logic remains largely invisible to their users, asking these questions is not optional. It is a governance responsibility.
Conclusion
Collaboration is not a soft skill. It is a governance problem, and treating it as anything less leaves organisations ill-equipped to understand why their programmes succeed or fail.
The PMI Standard for Program Management (5th ed.) has taken a significant step by recognising collaboration as a foundational performance domain and by naming trust as its structural condition. But naming a problem is not the same as analysing it. Trust does not emerge from goodwill or leadership alone. It depends on the governance architectures, communicational regimes, and power relations that determine what circulates, who is heard, and what forms of collective action become possible.
As organisations grow increasingly reliant on digital platforms, automated workflows, and AI-mediated communication, these questions become more urgent, not less. The systems through which collaboration is now mediated are not neutral. They install their own logic, and that logic shapes the conditions under which trust, solidarity, and genuine collective action can be sustained.
Ubuntu by Design does not offer a blueprint. It offers a different set of questions, questions that begin not with efficiency or output, but with the relational and communicational conditions that make collective performance possible in the first place.
The governance of collaboration in complex programmes will require both. Frameworks that ask « are we delivering? » and frameworks that ask « are we building the conditions under which delivery remains humanly and collectively sustainable? »
That is the conversation this article hopes to open.
References
Jeanneret, Y. (2008). Penser la trivialité. Volume 1 : La vie triviale des êtres culturels. Hermes-Lavoisier.
Luhmann, N. (1979). Trust and Power. John Wiley & Sons.
Project Management Institute. (2024). The Standard for Program Management (5th ed.). PMI.
Tounkara, M., Labour, M., & Abba, H. (2026). When GenAI Meets Ubuntu: Road-Testing Qualitative Interviewing with LLMs. (forthcoming).