Collaboration is not all about trust. As a matter of fact many of our organizations most important decisions need to be taken in cross collaborative settings where the collaborators have not had time to build trust. Also, employee turnover and transforming industries have created a situation where team members are constantly being added and replaced in management teams who 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 transform. In such situations we often bring in great new individuals with valuable knowledge. The article goes into how it is natural to 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If transformation is on your agenda you need to stop believing in old outdated heuristics like “Collaboration starts with trust” and instead turn to new research on Collective intelligence and Teaming that suggest and proves that groups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.