Collaboration is not all about trust. As a matter of fact in many organizations important decisions need to be taken in settings where the people involved have not had time to build trust with eachother.
Also, employee turnover and transforming industries have created a situation where team members are constantly being added and replaced in teams that need to make high quality decisions together. Most often we can not accept low quality decisions for 5-9 months (a short trust building phase) every time a team member is added or replaced so we need to come up with ways to collaborate and function in situations where trust has not had time to build yet. This is the topic of my latest Harvard Business Review article (that you can find here).

This is especially important for organisations that aim to scale and/or transform. In such situations we often bring in great new individuals with valuable knowledge. The problem is that organizations rarely tap in fully to that knowledge and one reason could be that we overemphazise trust in situations where the level of trust is naturally low. The article goes into how it is natural to not feel trust and even dis-trust towards people we have not worked with before, especially if they are different than us.

If transformation is on your agenda you need to stop believing in old outdated heuristics like “Collaboration starts with trust” and instead turn to new research on Collective intelligence and Teaming that suggest and proves that groups can collaborate effectively well before trust has had time to form. You will get a crash course in just that in the article mentioned above.