Real trust and how to build it

Treating trust less like a vibe, and more like plumbing

Trust is one of those concepts (see also ‘authentic’ and ‘innovative’) that most organisations want to be associated with, and yet when you try and define it (or measure it), it’s like trying to catch smoke.

Some of that difficulty comes from the perception that trust is all about ‘warm vibes’ and human connection (if you’ve ever done a team building exercise where you have to fall backwards into a colleague’s arms, then you know what we’re talking about). Plus the idea of trust encapsulates such a huge swathe of subjects and challenges, it can be hard to know where to begin thinking about it.

And yet, trust is a fundamental part of the success of any organisation; particularly those doing Hard Things. Those that need to bring people together in order to crack difficult problems; or test new and unproven ideas out in the world; or cultivate the resilience to be able to weather moments of crisis and come out the other side stronger and wiser....

What we want to start exploring in this issue is how we might make trust tangible. What happens if we stop considering trust to be vibes-based magic, and instead make it as boring as bus timetables and as prosaic as plumbing?

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📡 Signals Detected

A handful of recent trust-related things that have popped up on our radar recently.

• Trust amplifies innovation. A study of 350 ‘knowledge-intensive’ organisations found that trust and open communication combined with ‘benevolent leadership’ styles created an environment where employees feel able to share critical knowledge and this significantly improved their ability to adapt and innovate.

• Trust needs tending to. Evidence shows that while trust is precarious during uncertain economic times and in the wake of corporate scandals, organisations with high trust and psychological safety have employees who are more satisfied, engaged, and productive (and it’s particularly crucial in virtual teams and during organisational change).

• There’s a tech trust gap (more than one, actually). One study puts the number of people globally who are ‘willing to trust AI systems’ at 46%, and yet 66% are happy to rely on AI output “without evaluating its accuracy”. At the same time just 1% of global AI research currently comes from Africa, which means technological ‘solutions’ are being built that don't reflect local values, languages, or contexts.

Earlier this year we spoke to 102 leaders from across the globe to ask:‍Ten years from now, what will we regret not having done today?

From their answers emerged direction, hope and a way forward.

Join us for as we launch the ‘Dispatch from 2035’ and learn how we can begin building the kinds of systems our future selves will thank us for creating.

🤷 The 'So What?': Mechanics matter more than the feelings

The mundane truth about trust is that it only comes about after deeply practical work.

In our experience, sustainable and sturdy trust emerges from equally strong processes. It lives in routines, gets embedded through practices, and grows through boringly reliable actions.

This is good news if you’re thinking about how you build trust. Because it’s far easier to think about the fundamentals of deliberate design, ongoing maintenance and protocols than it is to think about vibes.

But it also means grappling with entrenched power dynamics, acknowledging where you might have got it wrong in the past, and facing up to that fact that creating real trust (the kind of trust you can trust, if that isn’t too meta) is an ongoing process that stretches far beyond quarterly box ticking.

Creating a functional trust infrastructure means treating it like any other critical system with regular maintenance checks, clear protocols for when things go wrong, and constant attention to the small interactions that might impact its performance.

We’ve written before about the relational and psychological aspects of creating better systems (for example, here’s our co-founder Lea writing about shifting the grantmaking paradigm), but for this purpose of this newsletter we wanted to show some of those reliable actions and rules of thumb that we’ve tried and tested in our work to bring trust to complex and messy environments.

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🛠️ Creating spaces that sustain rather than drain

The Trust Battery Audit

Every interaction either charges or drains trust between team members. Rather than assuming trust exists, it's worth systematically mapping which daily behaviours build it and which erode it.

• Charging actions: Responding quickly to questions, adjusting deadlines for teams when ‘life happens’, admitting uncertainty upfront, following through on small promises, and remembering what matters to people personally.

• Draining actions: Introducing surprise requirements, delaying decisions without explanation, pretending everything's fine during problems, changing processes mid-stream, and forgetting previous conversations or commitments.

• Warning sign: When people stop asking for help or bringing up concerns, your trust battery is likely getting dangerously low.

Making power visible

Before attempting to build trust, teams need to map where influence actually flows, not according to the org chart, but based on daily reality. This means identifying who truly sets meeting agendas, whose voices dominate discussions, what types of evidence carries weight (e.g. academic research versus lived experience), and who can refuse requests without facing consequences.

• One practical approach: Create structured opportunities for junior staff to speak uninterrupted while seniors listen without immediate response. This simple mechanism can produce significant shifts in group dynamics.

• Why it works: Making power dynamics explicit allows teams to consciously redistribute influence rather than pretending hierarchy doesn't affect trust-building efforts.

Documentation as trust building

It might feel paradoxical, but admitting what you don’t know is a short cut to strengthening trust. Some of the highest performing teams we work with are set up to systematically learn about what they don’t know, and are great at making that information visible (through open docs, trackers, dashboards etc).

• Pre-mortems become planning tools: Starting with "Here's what might go wrong" normalises discussing failure before it happens.

• Document variation: Recording what worked differently in different contexts is more honest than pretending one approach fits all.

• Show your working: Sharing reasoning behind decisions ("We chose X because of Y, despite concerns about Z") builds more trust than just announcing conclusions.

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📚 Trustworthy Brain Food

• 🎧 Listen: Edelman’s Trustmakers podcast is a series of conversations with global experts on “what it takes to build trust in today’s society”. Recent episodes look at the connections between mental health, social connection and trust, and proving authenticity in the age of AI.

• 📖 Read: A few years ago Lykke Margot Ricard was part of a study looking at the relationship between trust in colleagues and team performance. She wrote up their findings in this apolitical article, examining how the more trusted ‘go-to’ leaders tend to be those who are highly connected with a diverse network.

• 👤 Follow: If you’re interested in ‘documentation as trust building’ then you should give Giles Turnbull a follow. Here’s his collection of everything he’s even written on ‘working in the open’ and here is is on LinkedIn.

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This month’s mystery links

Your reward for reading down this far…

• Reimagining governance as something built with and for relationships.

• What does change look like?

• How does the public feel about AI analysing UK government consultation responses?

There are currently 1,620 people receiving this newsletter. The year 1620 was carved on to the ‘Plymouth Rock’ because a man named Thomas Faunce trusted his father, who told him that Plymouth Rock was where the Pilgrims had first set foot in the New World. It wasn’t. They had landed at Provincetown a month earlier.

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