Creative Courage

CHAPTER

4

Foster Trust

The Natural State of Silos

The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.

Ernest Hemingway¹

I. Raising the Curtain

Trust

When we care for people’s creative potential and secure their safety, respect emerges and trust is ripe, ready to grow. And when we show care for our own aspirations and our physical and psychological safety, we help create conditions to foster trust in ourselves and make it more difficult for the war on imagination to grasp at us. It makes us better leaders and improves the outcomes of our efforts toward innovation and breakthroughs.

Trust finds its strongest anchor in collaboration. In the best cases of constructive collaboration, we create something together that would be difficult or impossible to do on our own. That accomplishment makes all parties proud. Because we feel seen, safe, and accepted for our gifts and our vulnerabilities, we naturally foster trust to create something that meets a new challenge. Remember that trust is a fragile, dynamic, powerful process. It can be broken during the collaboration cycle as much as it can be reinforced.

Good Intentions, Wrong Results

At times, we might be puzzled by the results of our initiatives. We might feel, for example, that we have demonstrated care and secured safety, only to find the symptoms of the war on imagination raging with mistrust stronger than ever.

My parents deeply cared for me, but the way they cared was through unrelentingly worrying about me. They ...