Our intuitive feeling of distrust makes us more doubtful of the information brought by new individuals who haven’t had time to prove their trustworthiness. This puts us at risk of undervaluing important information that’s communicated by someone new and overvaluing other information.

Feelin...

To maximize productive behavior and strategic progress when gathering diverse groups to solve important, complex challenges, leaders are wise to communicate that interpersonal trust is not a prerequisite for collaboration.

This is important, as the inaccurate notion that “collaboration is ...

Two things stand out as critical to collaborative decision making on complex challenges.

1. In a fast-changing environment, you need access to accurate and updated data in order to make good decisions. 
2. Being able to include new individuals and their information into teams and dec...

Trust is a vague term and has a vast number of definitions. To understand trust in regard to collective decision making, keep these two definitions in mind:

1. In the organizational context, trust is most often defined as an interpersonal relationship that forms when a person shows consis...

• New individuals hold back information, challenging questions, and out-of-the-box ideas in order to establish themselves as competent, benevolent, and trustworthy.
• Individuals representing the old norm who are not experts in the area of transformation hold back questions and hide igno...

• It’s vital to get the most accurate data on the table, even when that data is unpleasant to share. Everyone involved is responsible for creating an atmosphere where others can act with both candor and vulnerability when sharing their perspective.
• Our individual willingness to explore...

Trust is not a prerequisite for teamwork and collaboration. Research on teaming and collective intelligence suggests that if we focus on getting a few things right, new constellations of people can collaborate effectively before they’ve had time to build trust.

Successful transformation dep...

When leaders focus on getting the conversations right, groups often improve decisions and progress quite quickly. The experience of shared progress often strengthens trust between collaborators. It might sound counterintuitive, but shifting attention away from trust might be one effective way to ...