For decades, technology has been advancing with the same promise: to make work smoother, smarter, more collective, and more collaborative. Each new wave, from email to instant messaging, from business social networks to artificial intelligence, has promised us that collaboration would finally be simple, almost natural, and on paper, the promise seems to have been kept: we communicate more, faster, with more people.
And, in a way, we have succeeded in transforming the organization of work into a gigantic network of information flow.
But in fact, the more we communicate, the less we really collaborate. We have confused the fast flow with the quality of the collective, and what technology has brought us is not increased cooperation but a volumetric increase in signals, interactions, documents—in short, everything that looks like work without necessarily being so.
All we have done is produce more information and circulate it faster. But to what end?
In short:
- Technology has enabled a massive acceleration in the exchange of information without actually improving the quality of collaboration within organizations.
- This overabundance of signals and interactions creates an illusion of efficiency, when in fact it fragments collective efforts and prevents the construction of a shared meaning.
- Collaborative tools reinforce existing practices without transforming the way we work; they promote the production of visible content rather than concrete and useful actions.
- Artificial intelligence accentuates this logic by facilitating the fast production of empty content (the “workslop”), reinforcing a culture of proof of activity at the expense of real impact.
- The real challenge is no longer speed but the value produced collectively, which means rethinking collaborative work by focusing on useful contributions rather than simple production.
The promise of technology: always more, always faster
My opinion on the purpose of technology in business has not changed one iota over time. Its promise is not to help us do things differently or better, but to do more and do it faster. It can be used to do better, but that requires a deliberate approach to transforming work and business design (To manage is to design), and technology, in this case, only comes into play in a second phase to support that.
This logic is fully expressed in the field of collaboration. More information, disseminated more widely, more quickly, more frequently: this is the path we have taken. The problem is that as long as we accelerate, we feel like we are moving forward.
But instead of bringing efforts closer together, this acceleration has scattered them, and while it has connected people, it has never connected their intentions. Above all, it has created a cacophony of exchanges that no one really knows what they produce, and what was supposed to empower the collective has often ended up fragmenting it.
We have succeeded in connecting people without necessarily getting them to work together.
Tools amplify without improving
Collaborative tools have come and gone, promising transformation, but in reality they have only amplified existingreflexes. Messaging, sharing platforms, co-editing spaces: everything is designed to produce, comment, and react, but never to sort, decide, or transform an exchange into action.
This proliferation of tools has led us to confuse the production of information with work itself (Is creating documents really work?). Writing, sharing, and annotating have become ends in themselves, as if the accumulation of digital traces proved the value of the contribution. We no longer collaborate: we feed a stream.
Today, the perceived value of work is based more on the visibility of information production than on its actual usefulness.
AI: computer assisted noise proliferation
And now artificial intelligence has arrived, not to correct the situation, but to take the logic to its extreme. AI does not solve our problem of information overload; it accelerates it by allowing us to produce more content, faster, with less effort. It virtually automates our speech before we have even finished our thoughts, when we would benefit from slowing down, sorting, and structuring; it invites us to pour out even more.
This is the ultimate promise of technology pushed to the point of caricature: to produce without limits, to produce for the sake of producing and occupying space and attention, to produce independently of each other’s needs. This is no longer collaboration but computer-assisted noise proliferation. In this context of saturation, the real scarcity is no longer information but the ability to decide, prioritize, and create shared meaning.
And now a new concept has arrived: the workslop, which refers to the automatic production of content that looks like a job well done but lacks any substance. Reports, notes, and summaries that are impeccably formatted but completely empty, which someone will have to check, complete, and correct, without actually advancing anything (AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity).
But workslop is not an accident or the result of misuse. “Every system is perfectly designed to achieve the results it achieves”, Deming told us, and workslop is simply the meeting of a system where we are judged more on our evidence of activity than on our impact, and a tool that helps produce that evidence with less effort, even if it is at the expense of quality.
And if you are despairing at the proliferation of meaningless and uninteresting content that is flooding the internet and degrading it, tell yourself that if nothing is done to change it, the same thing is already happening in business.
I am talking here about a cognitive cost, which of course has an economic cost, but we could also talk about the environmental cost, which we still largely turn a blind eye to (AI, the driving force behind unprecedented energy growth and Sustainable digital: no more hypocrisy ).
From speed to value
The real challenge of collaboration today is no longer speed but value. Instead of a system that circulates information faster, we should try to build an environment where collective effort produces something concrete, coherent, and useful. We need to move away from the productivity reflex and return to the contributory one.
Technology has delivered on its promise because it effectively allows us to do more on a larger scale, and it is now up to us to choose whether we want to do better or simply do more.
Bottom Line
We have spent twenty years accelerating the flow of information, but perhaps it is time to ask ourselves whether we have really accelerated the work. Technology has not betrayed us; it has simply amplified what we already were: fascinated by movement, impatient for results, but often unconcerned about quality and meaning.
Progress is no longer a question of speed, and collaborating is not about occupying space but inhabiting it. Perhaps modernity will be about relearning how to do less, but together.
To answer your questions…
Digital tools have increased communication without strengthening real cooperation. They accelerate the flow of information but disperse efforts and intentions. We communicate more, but we work less together. True collaboration requires rethinking work before adding tools, to give common meaning to exchanges.
Going faster and faster creates an illusion of efficiency. In reality, rushing prevents reflection, coordination, and decision-making. Flow takes precedence over value. To collaborate better, we need to slow down, structure, and prioritize clarity over quantity.
AI amplifies content production without necessarily improving its quality. It automates writing before thinking and fuels information overload. Used without a framework, it increases noise instead of creating meaning.
Workslop refers to automatically generated content that appears serious but is hollow. It gives the illusion of activity without any real value. This phenomenon reflects a system where visibility counts more than impact.
We need to shift from a focus on speed to a focus on meaning. Technology should support collective work that is geared toward useful results, not just visible ones. Collaboration is less about producing more and more, and more about producing better together.
Image credit: Image generated by artificial intelligence via ChatGPT (OpenAI)
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