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—not as a rejection of the Standard’s managerial contribution, but as an attempt to extend its insights through a communicational and relational perspective.
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 the perspective of Information and Communication Sciences—SIC in the French academic tradition—collaboration is never simply a matter of people working together: it is always mediated. Drawing on this tradition, and on Yves Jeanneret’s account of trivialité in particular, I propose to understand collaboration as 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.
These four terms describe two distinct dimensions. The first—what circulates, and in what form—concerns the transformation of meaning as it passes through mediating devices; I develop it below through Jeanneret’s concept of trivialité. The second—with what authority, and whose voice is recognised as legitimate—concerns the distribution of power and recognition; it is taken up later in this article, through Luhmann’s analysis of trust and power and the asymmetries it makes visible.
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.
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, more than a statement about interpersonal relations. It raises a question of governance. Yet trust remains largely presented as a desirable condition to be cultivated through leadership, transparency, empathy, and consistent behaviour. Although these dimensions matter, such a framing risks treating trust primarily as a moral quality of individuals rather than as a condition shaped by organisational structures.
Niklas Luhmann’s sociology of trust provides a more structural account. In Trust and Power (1979), trust is not understood primarily as a virtue or as the expression of a positive relationship between individuals. It is analysed as a mechanism for reducing social complexity. Organisational actors cannot possess complete information about every decision, anticipate every possible outcome, or continually verify the intentions of everyone involved. Trust allows them to act despite this uncertainty. It makes possible a commitment to a course of action whose consequences cannot be fully known in advance.
This perspective does not mean that trust eliminates uncertainty or risk. On the contrary, trust becomes necessary precisely because uncertainty remains. To trust is to accept a degree of vulnerability while acting on the expectation that certain people, roles, procedures, or systems will behave in sufficiently predictable ways. Trust therefore does not arise from complete knowledge. It makes action possible where complete knowledge is unattainable.
This reframing has important implications for programme governance. If trust enables action under conditions of complexity, it cannot be produced solely through exhortations to openness, integrity, or collaborative behaviour. It must also be supported by organisational arrangements that make expectations sufficiently stable, decisions sufficiently intelligible, responsibilities sufficiently identifiable, and avenues for questioning or contestation sufficiently legitimate.
Luhmann distinguishes personal trust from forms of trust placed in social systems. Personal trust develops through relationships in which individuals acquire some familiarity with one another’s conduct. System trust, by contrast, enables reliance on roles, institutions, procedures, and socially established mechanisms that extend beyond direct interpersonal familiarity. In complex programmes, where participants are distributed across organisational units, professional communities, contractual relationships, and geographical locations, collaboration cannot depend exclusively on personal trust. Actors must also be able to rely on governance arrangements whose operation is relatively predictable, even when they do not personally know everyone involved.
System trust, however, should not be equated with passive acceptance or unquestioning faith in organisational procedures. It remains vulnerable to experience. It can be strengthened when rules are applied consistently, when decision-making responsibilities are identifiable, and when participants can understand how consequential choices are made. Conversely, it can be weakened when procedures appear arbitrary, when accountability is unclear, or when formal mechanisms repeatedly contradict participants’ lived experience of the organisation.
Luhmann’s analysis of power must be approached with equal care. Trust and power are not identical mechanisms, nor can trust simply be reduced to an effect of domination. Luhmann examines them as distinct ways of making social action possible under conditions of complexity. Power structures the selection of possibilities by increasing the likelihood that certain decisions will be accepted, including in situations where alternative courses of action remain conceivable.
In programme governance, however, trust and power inevitably intersect. Governance architectures distribute the capacity to decide, to access information, to define legitimate knowledge, and to challenge established interpretations. These distributions shape the conditions under which actors are asked to accept uncertainty and vulnerability. The issue is therefore not that power automatically destroys trust, but that the organisation of power influences whether reliance on a programme’s structures appears warranted, intelligible, and sustainable.
A governance arrangement that concentrates decision-making authority, restricts access to relevant information, or provides no credible means of contestation does not merely create a communication problem. It increases the vulnerability of some participants while reducing their ability to assess the conditions under which they are expected to trust. Trust may still be formally invoked, but it risks becoming an asymmetric expectation: those with less control over information and decisions are required to demonstrate trust, while those who design or control the system remain comparatively protected from uncertainty.
This distinction helps extend the PMI Standard’s observation that representation in collaborative processes may depend on influence and power rather than on participation and empowerment. Power asymmetries cannot be addressed only by encouraging leaders to communicate more openly. They must also be examined through the governance structures that organise participation, distribute decision rights, establish the legitimacy of different forms of knowledge, and determine whether disagreement can influence collective action.
Trust can therefore be understood as an infrastructure of collaboration, not because it can be engineered mechanically, but because its emergence and durability depend partly on the communicational and institutional arrangements through which a programme operates. Governance does not manufacture trust. It creates conditions that may render trust more or less reasonable.
This question becomes especially important in contemporary organisations, where the structures mediating collaboration are no longer exclusively institutional or interpersonal. They are increasingly embedded in digital platforms, automated workflows, reporting systems, and AI-assisted tools. As these technical systems participate in selecting information, assigning visibility, and structuring organisational choices, they also reshape the conditions under which system trust can be sustained.
When Collaboration Becomes Technically Mediated
The question illuminated by Luhmann’s account—how action remains possible under conditions of complexity and incomplete knowledge—takes on a new and more acute dimension in contemporary organisations. The forms of reliance on which collaboration depends are no longer mediated solely by interpersonal relationships and institutional arrangements. They are increasingly shaped by technical systems: project management platforms, automated reporting tools, shared dashboards, asynchronous communication environments, 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 reproduce what was said. It selects, prioritises, and reformats information according to technical parameters and probabilistic patterns that shape what is retained as relevant, salient, or actionable. In this process, tacit dimensions of communication—such as hesitation, dissent, relational tension, or the gradual emergence of shared understanding—may be reduced, standardised, or omitted. The resulting output can then appear as a neutral record of collective decision-making while obscuring the communicational choices through which that record was produced.
Recent empirical research provides grounds for examining this risk. 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. Within the specific context of simulated semi-guided interviews, their study identified a recurrent pattern: while values such as Respect-Dignity and Compassion were relatively well represented, Solidarity—understood as the recognition of collective interdependence and mutual obligation—received comparatively weaker representation across the three models. These findings do not establish a universal property of AI-mediated communication. They nevertheless raise an important question about whether systems oriented towards discrete, individualised, and readily actionable outputs may render relational and collective dimensions less visible.
The implications for programme collaboration therefore require careful investigation. When AI systems participate in summarising discussions, prioritising actions, or formalising collective decisions, they may reconfigure the communicational regime of a programme in ways that weaken the visibility of solidarity and relational interdependence. A programme that relies on AI-mediated communication is not merely adopting a productivity tool. It is also introducing a technical mediation whose effects on voice, recognition, trust, and collective sense-making should become an explicit object of governance.
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, make an important contribution by foregrounding trust, transparency, culture, engagement, and psychological safety. Because they are primarily designed to guide managerial action, however, they do not always examine in depth how governance architectures, communicational arrangements, and power relations shape the conditions under which collaboration becomes possible, constrained, or merely procedural.
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? Luhmann’s framework helps explain why complex programmes cannot depend exclusively on personal familiarity and must also rely on confidence in roles, procedures, and institutional arrangements. Ubuntu by Design extends this analysis by asking whether these arrangements are sufficiently intelligible, consistent, equitable, and open to contestation. When they become opaque—whether through organisational complexity or algorithmic mediation—the conditions under which reliance appears reasonable may erode, and collaboration risks becoming, 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 merely a soft skill; it is also a governance problem, and treating it solely as an individual or relational competency 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 one of its essential conditions. But naming a problem is not the same as fully analysing it. Trust is not sustained by goodwill or leadership alone. Its emergence and durability are also shaped by governance architectures, communicational regimes, and power relations that influence 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 (H. Davis, J. Raffan & K. Rooney, Trans.). Chichester: 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).