It is early morning and I am watching a mother and her baby and thinking of the unbelievable bond of trust that exists between them and wondering why, as we grow into adult life, we become less trusting? I listen to politicians and bankers talk about trust and wonder why we do not see predominantly high-trust work relationships? I was recently at a large Japanese car manufacturer, a very big postal business, and with a bunch of very high powered sales people and all of them were asking, how do you build trust? My very simple answer is that you cannot start unless you yourself as an individual, team, leader, business, are personally trustworthy. Trust attracts trust. Charles Greene’s “The Trusted Advisor” (http://trustedadvisor.com/cgreen.books) or Coveys’s “The Speed of Trust” (http://www.coveylink.com/events-and-resources/speed-of-trust-events.php) emphasised the importance of trust for achieving organisational success.

I looked up “trust” in Wikipedia and learned that in sociology and psychology: “…the degree to which one party trusts another is a measure of belief in the honesty, fairness, or benevolence of another party…” I maintain that when trust is present, it will significantly enhance the ability to change and support (radical) change. This is because trust assists learning, creativity and innovation. Trust is a lubricant for social relations which in turn improve efficiency. We know that the prime organisational regulatory drivers of organisations can be categorised into governmental, organisational, peer or self regulation. However, we know that the most effective drivers of performance and productivity are self and peer regulation. Our challenge these days is that we have to stop asking ourselves whether it is right or wrong and now rely on, is it legal or not?

Much has been said lately about how open and collaborative innovation requires different parties to achieve outcomes built on trust. Indeed, we identified “lack of trust” as the number one reason why teams fail. If we want more experimentation, innovation and learning on our teams or organisations, we must establish an atmosphere that builds self-confidence and trust. Trust is extraordinarily fragile. Building it is a subtle, long-term process. It doesn't come from what we say — like telling people to trust us or talking about trust as a core value. The innovation process involves risk both for the business running the process and employees participating in the process. The business must invest resources in the process and it must be willing to implement creative ideas which have the potential to become innovations. It must also be willing to take the idea to commercialisation and cross the valley of death where most innovation flounders: that is within the organisation itself. Creative ideas are inherently more risky than incremental improvement ideas. Unless the business is willing to take on this risk, its innovation investment will bring only incremental results.