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By Root 1552 0

reputation and recommendations. Without trust, the Certainty Gap looks like the Grand Canyon. We drive slower, act more cautiously, shrink our circle of friends and associates, and generally default to more conservative impulses. When there is trust in the room, however, all of these tendencies are reversed. We are secure and so can act boldly. We feel free to invent a new process, for example, without being scared our boss will be angry with us for messing with the status quo. We experiment more, confident that even if we fail we will have learned something valuable and improved. If the very nature of trust involves risk, then the more trust there is, the more risks we can take. Studies have shown that if teams have a lot of trust, they outperform teams that don’t have trust.8 If you trust people’s vision for making a Wave, you’ll stand up with them. If you don’t trust it, you’re going to keep eating your hot dog. To take risks, then, the Certainty Gap must be filled with trust.

Trust enables risk. If I were to stand you on a sandy beach and ask you to jump as high as you could, try as you might you would not get very high. If I put you on a hard surface, like a basketball court, you could jump higher. It’s difficult to jump off of sand. That’s why we respect beach volleyball players; we know intuitively that their jumps are more difficult. In building construction, the more solid the foundation, the more stories that can be added to a skyscraper. The same holds true for leaps forward in business: The firmer the ground is, the more innovation can spring forth. The dynamic relationships between living things—like colleagues, partners, or companies—are like the shifting sand on a beach. But trust creates solidity. It stabilizes relationships and creates the hard floor from which you can walk or leap. This soft thing called trust is actually the hardest thing of all. When it’s there, it allows you to take a risk, to leap higher.

Innovation

In a hypertransparent, hyperconnected world, we are more exposed and discoverable. Opening up and letting information flow inherently involves more risk, less control, and increased vulnerability, so current conditions require us to be more comfortable in high-risk environments. A horizontal world, where teams collaborate across space and specialty, is unbounded and much more diverse. To function well—to take risks and reap rewards—you must have enough trust circles around you to allow you to work laterally in many directions at once. You’ve got to get good at heterogeneity, at developing the kinds of strong synapses that allow you to cover a much larger geography of interrelationships.

In a trusting environment, everyone feels emboldened to take more risks. They challenge the system more, they solve problems, and they don’t stay in small boxes afraid to venture into new territory for fear of criticism (by bosses or colleagues). Innovation flows from this creative spirit. Business is all about constantly pushing the edge. It asks us daily to go to uncharted territory; to take more chances; to leap higher or run faster; to create innovative new strategies, products, and systems; and ultimately to think more deeply than our competitors. To reap these sorts of rewards, we must take risks and create the environment in which others can do so as well. Some bright marketing people, comfortable in their high-risk environment, conceived of viral marketing. What could be more risky or counterintuitive than to expose a brand to the manipulations of consumers? Leaps of consciousness like this happen only in environments of trust.

Resting in the status quo leads to stasis and decline. For all great innovations, someone took a risk. They risked capital; they risked their energy; they risked their opportunity cost; and most important, they risked failure. We can’t innovate without the belief that we can succeed, the confidence that others will be there to help us on the journey, and the security that we will not be punished if we fail to reach our goal. A fast-moving world demands innovation for