Why Leaders Need to Embrace Adaptive Trust?Today

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As a leader guiding your organization through exponential change, you know flexibility and resilience are essential. Yet many leadership approaches operate under the belief that leaders should never break promises no matter what. However, in times of exponential disruption, how can one not break commitments when markets are changing faster than ever? Solutions that worked yesterday may be obsolete tomorrow.

To unlock your organization’s potential amidst uncertainty, you must champion a new evolution in trust?—?Adaptive Trust .

What is Adaptive?Trust?

Adaptive Trust is a concept and model that I created long ago and is part of the Enterprise Agility Ecosystem . At its core, Adaptive Trust is trust that adapts to changing contexts. It centers on transparency, intellectual humility , and goodwill among all stakeholders.?

Adaptive Trust is the ability to retain confidence even after breaking previous commitments. During rapid change, leaders inevitably have to abandon some plans, strategies, or promises that no longer serve the situation’s needs.

With Adaptive Trust, people have confidence that everyone will recalibrate expectations, priorities, and interactions when situations shift to reach new mutual understanding. Even when circumstances cause you to break promises, you retain the trust of others. While in other agile approaches breaking a promise is seen as something catastrophic, in Enterprise Agility is a way to build trust.

Adaptive Trust provides psychological safety for people to evolve perspectives and behaviors appropriately as circumstances require. There is empathy for the time needed to develop new capabilities.

Why Adaptive Trust Matters?Now

Adaptive Trust powers organizational agility?—?enabling you to continuously realign your company to seize opportunities in rapidly evolving markets. It supports your people in taking prudent risks to innovate and experiment with new potential solutions.

With Adaptive Trust, your teams will feel safe surfacing challenges transparently, allowing collective recalibration. People know market changes may dissolve old assumptions, requiring new shared direction. Limiting mindsets are replaced with collective learning and progress.

Adaptive Trust also enables you as a leader to change course amidst uncertainty without permanently damaging stakeholder confidence. Although prior commitments may be abandoned, people understand flexibility is necessary and work together to find new paths forward.

Steps You Can Take to Foster Adaptive Trust

• Model transparency and intellectual humility yourself. Admit when your own assumptions need to expand with new information. Take ownership for mistakes and course corrections.
• Give people space for learning and unlearning?—?you can use the Circle framework for the unlearning process! Provide resources and support for skill development aligned to new realities.
• Involve stakeholders in forming new direction. Listen and give voice to diverse inputs when systems and priorities need realigning.
• Communicate with compassion. Explain changes with empathy for the human impact. Provide reassurance that developing greater agility will enable shared success. You can use here the ELSA change model !

The Psychology Underpinning Adaptive?Trust

Trust is fundamentally about human relationships and perceptions. To truly enable Adaptive Trust, you, as a change professional, must understand its psychological foundations.

Cognitive Flexibility

Adaptive Trust recognizes people anchor to existing mindsets that shape their trust. Challenging entrenched beliefs and assumptions requires cognitive flexibility and Mental Agility . Adaptive Trust provides empathy and support for this cognitive load and growth process.

Dealing with Uncertainty

Adaptive trust recognizes that people crave consistency to cope with uncertainty and feel secure. Yet it balances this with recognizing when familiar structures or practices become unreliable amid disruption. Adaptive Trust provides psychological security for people to let go of past certainties and develop new stabilizing patterns.

Reconstructing Identity & Relationships

When change alters roles, status, and social connections, Adaptive Trust supports reconstructing professional identity and relationships. People are given time to redefine themselves and how they interact with others day-to-day as organizations transform.

Resilience

By preserving goodwill during challenges, Adaptive Trust strengthens collective resilience. People believe in positive intentions even when difficult changes emerge. This faith in themselves and others to ultimately find mutual benefit creates resilience.

With insights like these, leaders can cultivate Adaptive Trust in tune with human needs. With this, you can build a more flexible and resilient organization and culture ready to thrive in times of exponential change. Your people will feel confident facing uncertainty and disruption with you.