Over the last few years, there has been an enormous amount of industry discussion about how the digital world is changing the way we work. To any reasonable observer, the ways that we communicate, interact, and collaborate with each other are all in the midst of profound change. At least the why seems fairly clear.

At at high level, there appear to be three major root causes for why collaboration — the very core of how people come together and function as a business — is in the midst of reinvention:

1. Hierarchical management styles break down in the face of the inherent complexity and scale of the modern business environment.
2. New digital tools have put us in constant and direct contact with nearly every person in the developed world at virtually no cost or effort. Thus businesses are now primarily subject to the power laws of networks, rather than…