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A good navigation system doesn’t promise the route you expected.
It offers a reliable way of finding the best route with the information available.
Perhaps trust at work works the same way.
When someone trusts your process, they don’t necessarily expect you to produce the outcome they want.
They trust how you will get there.
For the individual, that changes something.
Less energy goes into reading the room or predicting what someone above wants to hear.
More goes into examining the evidence, questioning assumptions and changing direction when new information appears.
Without that trust, a different invisible rule can emerge:
My job isn’t to find the best route. It is to arrive where someone has already decided we should go.
Multiply that across an organization and it becomes more than an individual problem.
People may follow all the right processes while quietly steering them towards acceptable outcomes.
Perhaps the real test of trust isn’t whether the process takes us where we expected.
It is whether we still trust it when it doesn’t.
