People often come together to do something, especially when it comes to activism, community work, social justice, or project collaboration. Having a common purpose can help people find each other and motivate them to invest in building relationships.
You might even extrapolate this to people coming together in any kind of democratic context.
The problem is that we often don’t take the time to build the trust necessary to making these situations sustainable.
The result of a failure to build trust can manifest in many ways. In some cases, the whole thing just implodes and people stop showing up, or numbers dwindle down to a core group of people who already had the trust with one another.
In other situations, democracy starts to look more like autocracy, perhaps with a benevolent dictator, perhaps with a shadow group running the show while the illusion of democracy is maintained.
What does trust allow for that allows democracy to function?
First, it means people understand that in a group of people, there are always differences in the level of commitment, understanding, status, and personal liberation for each person in a group.
Second, it means that making a decision can be collaborative and people can share what they really think without fear of reprisal or ostracism.
Third, it means the group is more invested and aligned with a decision because even if they disagree, they believe the choice was made in good faith and that their dissent was recognised and acknowledged.
There’s a bit of a circularity here, but before a group can be effective at making any decisions, they need to build trust. And trust largely comes from getting to know one another, having boundaries and container that allow us to be vulnerable enough to be known, and to practice listening-focused engagement. When those conditions are met, we can move on to conversations that work, and then to decisions.
For many of us who like getting s*** done, it can be uncomfortable to be in the trust-building stage. Let’s just make a decision, let’s see the fruits of our collaboration! We’re wasting time!
The problem is that when groups move quickly without building trust, they inevitably invite dominance into the process. Not everyone feels heard. The loudest voices lead the way. We start creating situations where some people feel uninvested in or confused by decisions, and people begin creating factions or leave the group.
I’m going to skip over what this looks like in nations or large-scale platforms, but in groups where we want to achieve something that requires any level of sustainability and ongoing commitment, we are best served by making sure we’ve spent the time to talk to each other.