In recent years, nearly every company has been talking about collaborative work, and almost all of them inevitably touch on a key term: digitalization.

Migrating systems to the cloud, putting processes online, and making information visible have all been hailed as markers of organizational evolution. Many managers hold an implicit assumption: as long as everyone is on the system, collaboration will naturally happen. But after actually going through the process for a while, there’s often an unspoken sense of disappointment—the tools are all in place, people are busy, yet the organization hasn’t become smoother as a result. Instead, a new layer of friction has been added.

My own understanding of this has gone through a clear shift. Early on, I also believed that the core of collaboration lay in “aligning information,” and the most direct way to achieve that was through tools and systems. So we kept introducing new platforms, trying to cover more scenarios with increasingly comprehensive systems. Until one day, I realized a counterintuitive phenomenon: the more complete the system, the more teams relied on “waiting for the process” or “checking the system.” Collaboration was no longer an active behavior but had become a passive execution.

The problem isn’t with the tools themselves, but with how we understand collaboration. Collaborative work has never been about “moving behaviors online”; it’s about “how an organization forms shared judgment.”

Digitalization solves the problem of “seeing,” but not of “understanding.” It solves “synchronization,” but not “alignment.” When managers focus only on whether the data has been uploaded or whether the process is running smoothly, while ignoring the underlying cognitive logic, collaboration becomes a form of performative diligence.

This has become especially evident in the post-pandemic era. With remote and hybrid work becoming the norm, many organizations quickly filled the gaps with online tools, only to find that the sense of team rapport was actually declining. On the surface, everyone is online at all times, but in reality, it’s becoming harder to gauge each other’s true status and priorities. Collaborative tools make information more dense, yet also more fragmented; communication becomes more frequent, yet lacks context. Over time, what people learn isn’t “how to collaborate,” but “how to protect themselves within the system.”

From this perspective, what collaborative work truly tests is whether an organization has a mature “capacity for consensus building.” Are goals truly understood, or merely announced? Are responsibilities genuinely taken on, or simply distributed? Are decisions actually made, or endlessly debated? Tools can record these outcomes, but they cannot replace the processes themselves. If an organization cannot function without its systems, the problem lies not with the systems, but with the organization itself.

This is also why some teams collaborate smoothly with relatively simple tools. They may not document everything, but they share a high degree of implicit understanding about “what matters,” “who decides,” and “when to stop.” The role of the system here is not to command how people work, but to help reduce unnecessary friction, freeing up energy for the areas that truly require judgment. Conversely, if an organization lacks this foundational capability, the system will only solidify the chaos.

When many companies talk about digital transformation, they often complete the “digital” part but fail to achieve the “transformation.” Digitalization is not about copying offline processes online; it forces organizations to re-examine: which things are worth being turned into processes, and which must be left to human judgment; which information needs to be transparent to everyone, and which is better kept within a small circle. Behind all this lies a fundamental shift in management philosophy, not just the success of an IT project.

The same logic applies to collaborative capability. It cannot be built through a few tool training sessions or a set of collaboration guidelines. It comes from long-term management choices: Are you willing to let different teams act before they are fully aligned? Can you accept short-term duplication and friction in exchange for lower long-term understanding costs? Do you truly prioritize “aligning cognition” over “executing actions”? These choices determine whether collaboration is alive and dynamic, or flattened by processes.

So, when we talk about collaborative work again, perhaps we should start from a different place. Instead of asking “what tools should we use,” we should first ask, “do we already have the organizational conditions for collaboration?” Tools are always the outcome, never the cause. True collaboration happens outside the system, but it is amplified within it. Only when an organization understands this will collaborative work avoid becoming an expensive yet hollow digital performance.