Trust Is the New Currency: Why Volatility Demands a Human-Centered Reset
When the ground shifts beneath your feet, do you tighten your grip or reach for a hand?
In stable times, control delivers. In uncertain times, it destroys.
As AI rewrites the boundaries of work, markets fracture, and employees rethink what work means, many leaders respond by clamping down: more oversight, more metrics, more pressure.
But control doesn’t scale in chaos. Trust does.
In today’s landscape, trust is no longer a soft sentiment: it’s the hard infrastructure of adaptability, engagement, and innovation. It’s what allows humans and machines, individuals and collectives, to learn together, pivot quickly, and thrive in disruption.
Ancient Lessons, Modern Urgency: Why Trust Is Older Than Strategy
Long before we had org charts and OKRs, ancient traditions had already codified a key truth: progress is impossible without mutual trust.
Confucius warned in the Analects, “Without trust, we cannot stand.” In his world, trust wasn’t philosophical; it was political. The glue of cities, families, and governments.
The Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu shared the concept of Ubuntu, which offers a similar insight. This word, in both Bantu and Zulu in southern Africa, is an ethic that means “I am because we are,” and centers on trust and interdependence as essential for human flourishing. Trust is not a luxury; it’s a strategy for collective resilience.
Across Abrahamic religious traditions — Jewish, Christian, Islamic — the idea of covenant speaks to enduring trust in the face of uncertainty. Not contracts of transaction, but commitments of care.
And in modern psychology, Carl Rogers put it bluntly: “When I look at the world, I’m pessimistic, but when I look at people I am optimistic.” (Rogers, 1961)
Trust isn’t passive belief. It’s active interdependence. It’s built through action: kept promises, shared risk, and open dialogue, even when outcomes are unclear.
The Biology of Trust: Your Brain on Belonging
We don’t just talk about trust. We feel it biochemically.
When trust is present, the brain releases oxytocin, a hormone that lowers fear and heightens empathy. It makes collaboration neurologically possible. High-trust teams exhibit:
Higher productivity
More creative risk-taking
Faster recovery from setbacks
(Zak, 2017)
Add to that Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety (when leaders reinforce the belief that team members are safe to speak up and take risks) and the science is clear: trust is not a “nice to have” in a business setting. It’s required to turn volatility into learning.
Anthropology of Uncertainty: Rituals, Storytelling, and Distributed Leadership
Anthropologists have long observed that communities facing existential risk don’t default to command-and-control. They deepen trust. When survival is on the line — whether from famine, conflict, or environmental upheaval — top-down edicts often falter. Instead, people turn to each other, reinforcing bonds of mutual reliance and shared responsibility. Trust becomes the currency that buys resilience, enabling quick adaptation and collective action in the face of uncertainty.
In tribal societies, rituals create shared identity. Narratives bind people to common cause. These rituals — whether communal feasts, rites of passage, or storytelling around the fire — are not mere traditions. They are sophisticated social technologies, designed to reinforce group cohesion and signal belonging. Through them, values are transmitted, roles are clarified, and grievances are aired and resolved. Distributed leadership emerges, where knowledge is shared, not hoarded. Elders, shamans, and skilled members each contribute their expertise, and decisions are often made through consensus or consultation. It’s an example of adaptive design, honed over millennia to maximize group survival and minimize internal strife.
Fast forward to modern startups and crisis-ready organizations: the same patterns emerge. When stakes are high and uncertainty is the norm, rigid hierarchies tend to break down. High-functioning teams, especially under pressure, rely on:
Shared language: a set of terms, metaphors, and shorthand that enables rapid understanding and alignment.
Clear mission: a unifying sense of purpose that guides decisions and energizes action, even when the path forward is unclear.
Ritualized check-ins that blend emotion and execution: regular meetings or touchpoints where team members can voice concerns, celebrate wins, and recalibrate priorities together.
These aren't cultural extras. They're operating systems for trust, and trust is the operating system for speed, innovation, and resilience.
Generative AI: Trust Is the Gateway to Co-Intelligence
GenAI is here, and its value will be determined not by the code, but by the culture surrounding it.
Its true potential is unlocked only when:
Teams trust one another enough to share, experiment, and fail forward
People trust the AI as a co-creator, not just an efficiency tool
Leaders trust the system enough to decentralize decision-making
Without trust, AI becomes another surveillance tool. With trust, it becomes a co-agent — a collaborator in ideation, analysis, and decision-making.
This is not automation. This is augmentation. Trust turns AI from a “what” into a “who” in the creative process: surfacing new insights, iterating with humans, and expanding collective capacity.
Control Kills What It Seeks to Protect
Too many leaders still operate under industrial-era reflexes: dashboards, surveillance tools, output obsession. These may bring comfort—but they erode trust, reduce ownership, and strangle innovation.
As Peter Senge warned, “The more you try to control a system, the less adaptable it becomes.” (Senge, 1990).
Trust unlocks adaptability.
Paul Zak’s research shows:
50% higher productivity
76% more engagement
40% lower burnout in high-trust organizations (Zak, 2017).
Control feels strong. Trust is strong.
From Worker to Value Creator: A Shift in Lens
We must stop managing people as productivity units and start enabling them as value creators.
In trust-rich cultures:
Problems are owned, not escalated
Learning happens in real time, not in review cycles
Dissent becomes design input, not career risk
It’s a mindset shift; from compliance to co-creation, from rigid process to networked purpose.
In a world spinning faster than most organizations can plan for, you don’t win by out-controlling the chaos. You win by building systems of trust that adapt faster than the disruption. And the fuel for that system? Trust. In people. In purpose. In shared potential.
So, what’s one thing you could do today to build trust inside your team?
Start with a conversation. A commitment. A change that signals trust, not suspicion. Because in the new economy, trust isn’t a soft skill — it’s your strongest asset.
References:
Confucius. The Analects.
Edmondson, AC. 2018. The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Wiley.
Frankl, VE. 1946. Man’s Search for Meaning. Beacon Press.
Rogers, CR. 1961. On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy. Houghton Mifflin.
Senge, PM. 1990. The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. Doubleday.
Tutu, Desmond. 1999. No Future Without Forgiveness. Image.
Zak, PJ. 2008. The Neurobiology of Trust. Scientific American 298.6.88-95.
Zak, PJ. 2017. The Neuroscience of Trust. Harvard Business Review 95.1.84-90.
Zak, PJ & Knack, S. 2001. Trust and Growth. The Economic Journal 111.470.295–321.
Want to be part of the (r)evolution?
I’m putting the finishing touches on a book with my colleague Andrew Lopianowski—we’re calling it HumanCorps. It’s about rethinking how organizations cultivate purpose, adaptability, and trust in the age of generative intelligence.
If you’re doing this work — or know someone who is — we’d love to hear from you. Let’s build the future together.