ABSTRACT
The chapter discusses how trust can be understood from a complexity perspective. Trust is a patterning of how we relate to one another and is defined as a felt confidence that an individual and/or group will meet our expectations about a particular outcome. Trust is both cognitive and emotional and highly fragile because a single instance of untrustworthy behaviour can break our trust. Trust and respect are interconnected; and the reciprocal nature of trust means that if you don’t trust me, then I am unlikely to trust you and vice versa.
Trust can reduce transaction costs and make us more efficient. In times of anxiety and uncertainty, it can also enable us to manage our fear of uncertainty and allow us to explore productive doubt, which is fundamental to innovation, creativity, and meaning-making.
Trust can also hinder the exploration of productive doubt. Processes of inclusion and exclusion are often affected or determined by who we trust and who we don’t, which can create or strengthen in-groups and out-groups and lead to us vs. them thinking. Strong trust relationships can also lead to problems such as groupthink where maintaining inclusion in a group becomes more important than surfacing a different perspective.
