Everything Fails Without Trust
And what happens when it does
Air Canada has lost my trust. It didn’t happen instantly, but over the past few years, a pattern has emerged, and it’s unfavourable. Repeated flight delays and mediocre service have made it impossible for me to feel they’ll get me from point A to point B efficiently, or at all. So now, when I travel with them, I am actively anxious. Which makes me not want to fly with them.
Our world is built on trust. We get into cars with strangers because we trust that platforms have carefully vetted drivers. We opt into long-term committed relationships because we trust that we’ll honour the boundaries of the union. We pick restaurants based on ratings and reviews because we trust collective judgment. We consent to medical professionals putting us to sleep for procedures because we trust their training and governing standards.
Remove the built-in trust in the systems we operate within, and things start to unravel.
We lose trust when what was promised was not delivered. When we’re repeatedly let down. When there’s a lack of transparency or honesty. When words and actions don’t align. What we need in the people and things we invest in is reliability. We want to know that what we agree to will unfold, and if that changes or fails, there’s enough awareness and care to ensure something will be done about it.
Trust can compound for years or decades, and break in an instant if the event is monumental enough. One bad meal at a restaurant is trivial. A baby’s car seat malfunctioning could be fatal. We can forgive errors, even if they’re repeated, based on their severity.
We gain trust when our needs and expectations are met or exceeded. We lose trust when the baseline falls below the midpoint.
The midpoint is the threshold at which trust is either built or broken. Where it lands is different for everyone, but there’s always a point past which we lose confidence.
We make hundreds of microdecisions a day, and trust plays a role in every single one. But not always consciously. It’s a filter running in the background. Understanding what moves trust, for ourselves and for others, is foundational, because everything fails without trust.
The formula looks something like this:
Trust = (trust in self + trust in the other) x consistency over time
We need baseline trust to move anything forward. And that trust is often two-sided. Employers trust that employees will use their time wisely and produce quality results; employees trust that their employer will pay them on time and treat them with dignity. There’s a version of this for everything. Sometimes trust is designed into the structure or process of things, like companies actively thinking about how to build trust in their product or marketing, and sometimes trust emerges more organically.
We can opt in or out
We’ve lost trust in our governing systems. Perhaps we didn’t have any to begin with and learned to exist within them out of necessity, but things have taken a turn for the worst and the task of rebuilding trust feels out of reach.
Baseline trust needs to provide safety and security. From that foundation, we build up to more trivial things. Without baseline trust, nothing else matters. Human-made systems can’t function without trust. Which is why they’re collapsing. Systems require our participation to survive. Without trust, we unwillingly participate. Unwilling participation is not sustainable.
Capitalism needs our trust to work, but it has exploited our trust and divided us by class. We unwillingly participate in it while dreaming about a post-capitalistic society. Which tells us that the moment we start losing trust is the moment we begin to reimagine alternatives.
The more constraints we feel, the more we want to rattle the cage. Trust is a driver of innovation. Creativity can thrive in a lack as much as in abundance. Maybe even more so.
When we decide that something needs to change, we need to believe that there’s something else, something better, on the other side. The people of Iran taking to the streets in hopes of overthrowing the Islamic Republic is a good example. They can’t imagine a worse situation than the one they are in, so while no one is clear about who or what might take the place of the regime, they’re pushing forward because it seems like the only choice.
Unwilling participation in systems we don’t inherently trust eventually leads to revolt and revolution. Revolution is the urgent and collective demand to shift the current reality. Without trust, we will continue to go through cycles of system collapse. And with each cycle, we become either more or less human.
What’s the rating?
Technology crowdsourced trust by enabling us to access information from across the globe. It leveraged our personal experiences to design a rating system that attracts or repels people. The term “social proof” didn’t exist before platforms gamified credibility and replaced relationships. Now we’re hesitant to invest in anything without a testimonial. We gained measurable trust, but we lost wonder and spontaneity.
Technology created systems to crowdsource trust, and we opted into it because we have too many options to choose from, and there’s power in numbers. But technology didn’t invent “trust by numbers”; institutions did, through coordinated human behaviour. The more people believe in something, the more real, valuable, and trustworthy it becomes. Think religion, propaganda, and Taylor Swift. We’re social mammals; we want others to align with us because we need to belong to groups. Social media followers are designed with the same premise; we deduce meaning from numbers, and that meaning is usually significance and legitimacy.
In a way, technology decentralized trustworthiness. Before user ratings, we relied on word of mouth, or we trusted our own judgement and intuition. But we’ve developed a culture of reference checks, which has increased trust by enabling us to make confident decisions faster, but has also eroded it by interfering with the natural process of discernment.
The most important task of any leader, brand, or product is to build trust with the people they intend to serve. Building trust has become significantly more challenging in a world where we can’t trust the media. The majority of the world used to believe the news, but now we question everything. Conspiracy theories have become their own brands.
The fastest way to get people’s attention is through media. We need that attention to attempt to build trust. But we’ve lost trust in the media (and I include all kinds of marketing in that), and now, with AI, we’re starting to wonder if anything is real—followers, engagement numbers, testimonials, photos, videos. We must constantly question whether we’re being manipulated.
What happens in a world where we don’t trust the systems that were designed to create trust?
Process over polish
Claims are cheap. But great stories are rich with depth and nuance. They’re authentic. They resonate. They’re relevant without trying to be. Storytelling in spaces, with people. Unscripted. Unrehearsed. Stories that bring us into the process, even if it’s messy. Especially when it’s messy.
A transparent process might become the greatest trust-building tool we have. The more AI becomes human, the more we’ll care about the process of things. How many times was this scene filmed? Which tools were used to generate this image? How long did it take to write this essay? I’ve already shared that one of the things we’ll value again in the AI era will be craft. But beyond that, we’ll want to understand the intricacies of how and why something came to be.
And I’m not talking about the way marketers tell stories to build trust. Not performative behind-the-scenes videos and strategic vulnerability. But truth. Depth. Unfinished, unpolished, imperfect storytelling.
Collectively, we’re tired of being sold to. Truths, lies, and everything in between. As it becomes harder to discern what is real from what is manufactured, the trust formula will evolve. Trust in self will increase significantly, and trust in other will become an extension of trust in self.
Those who learn to build genuine trust will recognize that the most effective way to influence others is to help them strengthen trust in themselves.