One of the first things I noticed when I went to live in former Eastern Bloc countries was how often conspiracy theories came up in everyday conversation. The institutions of society had lost trust long ago, so the official version of anything was always in doubt. People formed their own narratives to explain nearly everything.
Today we’re seeing something similar in America. An annual Gallup survey finds very little trust across almost every institutional class, including businesses. For example, when asked which institutions they trust “a great deal” or “quite a lot,” only 15% said they trust large corporations, 11% trust television news, and just 10% trust Congress.
This is more than a perception problem. It’s a breakdown in how society functions. Trust is what makes collective action possible. Without it, people don’t just disagree on solutions, they stop agreeing on what’s real. That’s what we’re seeing now. If we want to lead effectively, whether in society or inside organizations, we need to rethink how trust is actually created.
The origins of identity and trust
Traditionally, the prevailing theory among intellectuals was that religion originated in superstition. People needed some way to content with seemingly random forces they couldn’t control, like rain and drought. Religion gave primitive societies a way of understanding the world, or so the thinking went.
But evolutionary psychologists pointed out a fatal flaw in that idea. Religion is expensive. As anybody who has toured churches in Europe can attest, it takes up a tremendous amount of resources and human effort. If religion were merely superstition, nonreligious societies should have been able to outcompete religious ones. And we know from that did not happen.
Today the prevailing evolutionary theory of religion is that it enabled collective action. In a sense, the adornments, chanting, singing, and clapping are the point. If people can come together to perform elaborate rituals, they can also coordinate on other complex tasks, like organizing hunts, building structures, and executing coordinated attacks on enemies.
Every form of collaboration requires people to play different roles. In a church service, you have priests, congregants, a choir, altar boys and so on. To make the whole thing work, you need everybody to accept their own roles and trust that others will play theirs as well. If that trust breaks down, so does collective action.
That instinct hasn’t gone away. In the modern world we go to great lengths to signal our identity and the role we expect to play. We buy particular brands, adopt labels, and say things like “as a so-and-so, I think this-and-that.” Some of us wear uniforms. We feel empowered when others accept our identities, and insulted when they don’t. When that happens, trust breaks down.
Enabling collective action on a massive scale
In 1665, the Dutch polymath Christiaan Huygens noticed that two pendulum clocks in a single case would synchronize their behavior. At first, it seemed like a strange quirk, but scientists have since observed similar phenomena in fireflies blinking, crickets chirping, pacemaker cells in our hearts, even lasers and semiconductors.
This type of synchronization represents collective action on a truly massive scale and, as I explained in my book, Cascades, due to breakthroughs in network science, we now understand how these types of informational cascades function. What drives them is not centralized control, but small groups, loosely connected, and united by a shared purpose.
Imagine you work on a sales team in a large organization. You’re a tight-knit crew and you work well together to serve your clients. But there’s a problem with logistics. Shipments are getting lost and, despite your best efforts, you can’t get to the bottom of it. Your clients are furious and you are losing sales—not to mention the commissions that go with them.
Then one day your brother-in-law goes to work in the logistics department. Now anytime you or your colleagues have a problem, you call him. Even better, you and some friends from sales start going on golf outings with your brother-in-law’s buddies from logistics. The informational distance between your two departments reduces to nothing and you start working in sync.
In network parlance, you and your brother-in-law are boundary spanners, helping to bridge structural holes in your organizational network and bring down informational distance. What the network scientists found was that process is, in fact, almost infinitely scalable and can create synchronized action across truly massive networks.
Weaving connections across boundaries of role and identity
Let’s return to the example of a church service. You need different people to assume specific roles, but you also need congregants to set aside their individual identities. They come as doctors, lawyers, educators, and many other things, but for the purposes of collective action, those identities need to become secondary.
Every leader faces the same challenge. You need people to take on specific roles, like salespeople and logisticians, engineers and accountants. People also come to identify with their particular region or product group. To function effectively, everybody needs to accept and assume the integrated identity associated with the shared mission of the enterprise.
To do that you need to build boundary spanners at scale using network-based strategies. For example, Facebook originally designed its six-week engineering boot camp to help it scale by immersing new engineers in its methods and codebase. What it found, however, was that boot campers formed bonds with their cohort that persisted long after they moved to disparate parts of the company.
In a similar vein, Experian found that its employees who participated in its “Le Tour de Experian” bike rides to benefit charity built bonds that spanned organizational boundaries and led to professional collaborations. So it created Employee Resource Groups and Clubs to build connections across a wider variety of interests.
Other organizations encourage high-potential executives to rotate across divisions. Still others create seminars and best-practice programs. Today, leaders need to deliberately create connections that cut across boundaries. When you do, you don’t just improve communication, you build the trustful bonds that make large-scale collective action possible.
Rebuilding trust in institutions through connection to communities
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci became a household name. Signaling institutional authority, he stood behind a podium, wore a white coat, and talked passionately about the “science” of the disease and its spread. He asked people to change their behaviors, wear masks and distance themselves from their neighbors.
Many did not trust him or feel any connection. He felt distant, like some mysterious authority from Kafka’s Castle, someone from outside their community looking to dictate their behavior. Meanwhile, others signaling similar authority, wearing white coats, and claiming similar credentials felt closer on social media while offering very different advice. Fauci, in the eyes of many, became a nefarious figure.
In the early days of mobile phones and social media, we celebrated technology’s ability to undermine authoritarian institutions in the color revolutions and the Arab Spring. Now, as Moisés Naím has noted in The Revenge of Power, authoritarian governments have learned to undermine democratic institutions using those same tools. Through “populism, polarization and post-truth,” claiming to represent “the real people” against corrupt elites, experts, institutions, immigrants, and other outsiders.
Today, people reject information from institutions they feel alienated from, and leaders need to lead differently. Power no longer flows primarily from the top down, but emanates from the center of networks, and you gain power through connecting out. You can’t simply project authority from a podium. You need to build connections to communities in ways that respect and affirm their identities.
We desperately need to earn back trust. It is no longer enough to merely plan and direct action. We need to inspire meaning and empower belief. That requires connection not through mass media or high-flying campaigns with clever slogans, but through small groups, loosely connected, united by a shared purpose.