Trust, Complexity and Agility

Ongoing personal and professional debates in society about the nature of TRUST and the conditions necessary to establish and sustain it, continue to question the very nature of mutual coexistence.

 

Our sense of consciousness of risk continues to rise in almost all facets of human living, health, education, and services in general.  

 

How do we engender ways and means for individuals to trust themselves and cultivate and promote perspectives of trust?

 

The implication/s for trust to replace the corrosive influence/s of COMPLEXITY and usher in agility is hard to ignore. Trust, we can trust ourselves, is not that magic wand or a new process or methodology - but an ideology - a way of viewing and acting in the world. A value  - opposed to the ideology of compliance and accountability, with its focus on efficiency and predictability and detailed plans and internal focus, it’s an ideology of a ‘trust enabling environment’ that could engender a focus on self-organization, continuous improvement, an iterative approach, and above all, an enduring ability to trust ourselves as individuals.

 

A trust enabling environment sparks off true motivation, leading to an engagement with mastery, autonomy, and purpose – referred to in the Fifth Discipline of Peter Senge. This ‘motivation’ is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world’. In a world, where ‘the profit motive gets unmoored from the purpose motive’ and where individuals and teams strive for the creation of value. Life and Living assume complexity!

 

Leaders are usually held responsible for the trust, health and ‘success’ of an organization, but it is the CULTURE of organizations that provides the true foundation for these important factors.  While a leader's personality and skills influence how a trustful environment and working relationship is created, the organization too has a culture, tradition and experience of its own which influences the leaders' and here I may add other members’ success. The level of trust in an organization's culture will ultimately determine whether or not it is trustful, healthy and successful.

 

Organizations and institutions are often subject to the PROFIT MAXIMIZATION assault, and this usually comes in the guise of 'accountability' and 'choice', cloaking itself in the 'scientifically-proven' with an over-emphasis of data. Such an outlook, squanders away the realization that at every moment our fundamental task is to create and safeguard an open, accessible, and free environment, conducive to the growth of creative, caring, autonomous and responsible thinkers!