Cultivating trust is one of the basic tasks of social development. Whether as self-confidence, as trust in relevant others, as structural trust or as deeply rooted basic trust and trust in God - without confidence in a sustainable network, social action remains groundless.

According to Charles Feldman Trust the decision to „expose something that is important to you to the behaviour of another“ (Feldman, 2008). In this sense, there is no trust without the risk of losing control. If we want to cultivate trust - whether in self-organised or hierarchical contexts - we have to approach this loss of control as an open door. Brené Brown expresses this with the positive interpretation of vulnerability as a necessary leadership and interaction quality: „We need to trust to be vulnerable, and we need to be vulnerable in order to build trust.“ (Brown, 2018).

Trust in people and structures

While self-confidence and basic trust are among the individual foundations of successful cooperation, the decisive levers for organisational development lie in personal and structural trust. At the interpersonal level, two facets can be distinguished:

• Rational trust is based on the expectation of competence and reliability. I trust you because I believe that you have the skills to complete a task (this could also be referred to as „confidence“) and because you have honoured agreements in the past.
• Emotional trust arises from interpersonal bonding and identification. I trust that you will not harm my interests because we are connected by empathy and shared vulnerability, by common values or group affiliation.

Both aspects follow a self-reinforcing dynamic and are at the same time based on sometimes problematic attributions. When cultivating trust, it is important to create frameworks that promote positive dynamics without reinforcing dysfunctional attributions (such as status-related presumptions of competence or exclusive „bubble alliances“).

Beyond the personal level, the functioning of social systems is also based on a third form: system trust.

• System trust refers to trust in framework conditions and processes. I trust in the „rules of the game“ and the structural sustainability of the system, regardless of individual persons.

Stefan Kühl describes this structural component as follows:

„The performance of modern organisations is largely based on the abstraction of personal trust. In organisations, you can rely on the fact that employment contracts are valid, that salaries can be paid and claimed if necessary and that departments provide information because the rules stipulate this - regardless of whether you have a personal relationship with the employees responsible or not“ (Kühl, 2018).

 

Promises and sore points of system trust

System trust acts as a complexity management and scaling lever: in the transition from village to city, from the face-to-face situation of the family group to the differentiated organisation, personalised trust must be supplemented by system trust. Formalised certainty of expectations in roles and tasks, transparency and regularity in decision-making processes and the balancing of power with responsibility strengthen structural trust. The relevance of this quality is independent of the operating system of the organisation - it applies to agile cells as well as to „classic“ hierarchies and the wide range of organisational models in between.

However, system trust also has various catches and shortcomings:

• The gap in the regulationsNo system can regulate everything: In complex settings, personal trust and informal coordination act as „gap fillers“ and necessary „lubricants“ for incomplete formal structures. The more dynamic the environment, the more often (temporary) gaps in regulation will come to light.
• The paradox of controlStructural trust is not as efficient as personalised trust because it requires control: a system that is not controlled and maintained cannot guarantee certainty of expectations in the long term. Only mechanisms that allow and check mistrust (separation of powers, TÜV, scientific reviews, etc.) make it possible to trust the system as a whole. This control loop has its price.
• The atrophy of the socialStructural trust built on regulation can lead to personalised trust withering away: if it is primarily guidelines and contracts that regulate social interactions, there is no longer any need for personalised trust to develop - just as a leg muscle atrophies if it is supported by an exoskeleton over a long period of time. What was intended as a support function runs the risk of becoming a permanent substitute.
• The hour of crisis: The moment a system based on structural trust encounters a crisis of performance or legitimacy, trust between its members also collapses massively. In some cases, a lack of structural trust is then compensated for by excessive self-confidence. At the same time, in-groups form around particular ideas and interests or „communities of mistrust“ that define their cohesion through their rejection of the system. The Dortmund sociologist Aladin El-Mafaalani impressively describes how we are currently experiencing this at a societal level (El-Mafaalani, 2025).

Trust in the system is a necessary but not sufficient guarantee for sustainable cooperation. When cultivating trust, we need to address the personal and structural levels. We need to build structures that provide stability (system trust), but at the same time leave spaces in which we can meet as people in a binding and vulnerable way (personal trust). The trick is to stabilise the railing without taking away people's responsibility, the „risky advance performance of trust“ (Luhmann, 2000) on a continuous basis.

Register now for the lab „The seven muscles of self-organisation - cultivating trust“