In January, I stood alone on the Atlantic in Portugal. No programme, no agenda, no team. And at some point - I can't remember exactly when - a song by AnnenMayKantereit came to mind: „Three days by the sea and I know who I am again.“ I knew at that moment: that's exactly it. The sea brings me back to myself. And somehow also back to trust.

Worst-case study

I studied law. What did I learn? Above all: everything that can go wrong.

Every law, every contract, every agreement is intended as a hedge against the worst-case scenario. You train your brain for risk, for loopholes, for failure. That's not meant in a bad way - it even makes sense for many situations. But it wasn't good training for my trust in people, in institutions, in myself. The worst-case mindset can turn scepticism into mistrust - and caution into paralysis.

Aladin El-Mafaalani describes in „Communities of mistrust“ very precisely what happens when mistrust is no longer functional, but becomes a basic attitude: People no longer unite through shared values or goals, but through shared mistrust. They find support not in expertise or experience - but in doubting everything together. That is a threat to democracy. But I would add that it starts much earlier. In training programmes. In organisational structures. In us.

The triangle of trust

In April, Andi Knoth and Lysan Escher organised a lab on the topic of „Cultivating trust“ invited. The conceptual framework was a triangle of three dimensions:

Self-confidence & basic trust - the inner basis. Banduras self-efficacy, Erikson's psychosocial development phases. The question: What sustains me, even if there is no certainty?

Trust & confidence in the other person - the dynamic space between people. Trust as a process, not as a state. And trust as a decision, not as naivety.

System trust - Trust in rules, structures and institutions. Luhmanns Complexity reduction: without this, we can hardly get up in the morning, let alone work in self-organised teams.

Brené Brown put it like this: „We need to trust to be vulnerable - and we need to be vulnerable in order to build trust.“ The chicken-and-egg problem of trust.

An exercise and my discomfort

There was an exercise in the lab that still keeps me busy today.

Three people with one task: think about what you will do together in the five minutes after the end of the event - and commit to it. But: only one person alone decides what all three of you will actually do. The algorithm devised by the speakers decides who this person with decision-making power is.

I was the person who decided. The others had to follow the exercise. 

I am not a weak decision-maker. I can provide guidance, lead the way and enforce agreements. But at that moment, I found it simply absurd: I was the oldest person in the group, I was in my work home at SOCIUS - so I was already highly placed. And now I was supposed to decide what two people I almost didn't know were doing?

My decision was: „Everyone does what they want and what is good for them.“. And added what we had previously discussed as a possible appendix, so to speak. Andi commented dryly: „That's a bit of cheating.“

He was not wrong. The exercise made something important really tangible for me: Power without relationship, without established trust, without a shared context - that doesn't feel like leadership. It feels arbitrary. For me and probably for the other two as well.

Trust is not created by assignment. It grows - with Wolfgang Looss spoken - with agreements that are honoured. With time. With vulnerability. With courage.

Communities of mistrust - the other form of trust

I understand Aladin El-Mafaalani's book - I listened to it as an audio book - as a social diagnosis that also concerns me personally. The sociologist describes how communities have emerged in recent years that are not held together by shared values, but by shared mistrust. Those who belong do not need expertise, experience or a shared vision - it is enough to distrust the same institutions, the same experts, the same „system“. Mistrust itself becomes the social glue. However, mistrust is not bad per se - El-Mafaalani also emphasises this explicitly. Functional mistrust is necessary. It protects. It scrutinises. It keeps systems in motion.

I know this from my own biography. I studied law in Göttingen in the early 90s, I'm critical of the system, feminist, left-wing. My children went to independent alternative schools because we didn't think the state school system with grades, little exercise for the children, severe restrictions on self-determination and, as a result, a lot of family stress with homework, class tests and assessment pressure was trustworthy enough. As a family, we underwent curative treatment for years. And at the same time: the children were vaccinated, went to the paediatrician regularly, and today I walk around - figuratively speaking - with the Basic Law under my arm and insist on Article 3 and other fundamental and human rights.

Is that a contradiction - or a differentiated mistrust? My criticism of the system has always been that it doesn't protect enough. Not the women, not the children, not the marginalised. It supports structures that exploit the weaker. I maintain that my mistrust is based on something towards orientated - towards more justice, more participation, more protection.

What El-Mafaalani describes is something else. The tipping point comes when mistrust no longer indicates anything, but only against something. When there is no longer a common horizon other than the common enemy. When expertise is rejected across the board - not because science provides too little protection, but because protection itself is reinterpreted as control. When „The state is failing“ becomes: „The state is basically my enemy.“

Adorno has said: „There is no right life in the wrong one.“ This is not a call for paralysis - it is a call for vigilance. And vigilance requires the ability to distinguish between functional mistrust, which strengthens democracy, and destructive mistrust, which undermines it.

What does this mean for self-organised teams? Trust must be cultivated - actively, consciously, structurally. It is not enough to dismantle hierarchies and hope that trust will develop by itself. Self-organisation needs the triangle: 

• People who trust themselves. 
• Structures that create reliability.
• And the willingness to trust - even if there is no worst-case network underneath.

And then there was the Baltic Sea

A week after the lab, I travelled to the sea again. The Baltic Sea instead of the Atlantic. But the sea is the sea. Three days. And I knew who I was again. Cultivating trust perhaps begins right there: in what brings us back to ourselves. Before we can trust others, before we can trust systems - we have to recognise ourselves again. This is not an esoteric thesis. That is what Erikson meant. What Bandura meant. What Brené Brown meant.

And what I feel by the sea.