Whole Leaders, Wild Trust

CHAPTER 2Our Greatest Need: From Deep Desperation to Wild Aspiration

We are wired for trust but too often drowning in doubt—and the distance between those two is where our lives, our teams, and our organizations begin to break down.

Who can we trust? It’s one of the most challenging questions of our generation. Employees are asking this question. So are team members, sons and daughters, leaders—each of us. At a time when information is readily accessible and polarization is often the default, it’s hard to know what or who to believe. We’re built with an innate need to trust. But we’re living in what may be the widest gap in history between that need and our actual capacity to trust others.

When a need that deep goes unmet, hope is often the first casualty.

The information revolution has only made it harder. We have more data at our fingertips than ever before, but data fed to us by intelligent systems is often tailored to our biases—offering a curated view of the world that feels complete but isn’t. Too little data, and we don’t have what we need to decide. Too much, and we lose confidence that anything we hear is true. If you’re skeptical, just pick up the phone of a friend or family member and compare your news feeds. The contrast might lead to a lively dinner conversation—or maybe a critical insight about what (and who) we can actually trust.

In the past, we trusted what we were told—what we read in the newspaper, heard on the radio, saw on the news. But that’s not trust. ...