Trust By Design: The Book

About the Project:

Trust By Design is being developed as an accompaniment to innovation and organizational design theories.

The core premise is this: Trust within and across a team serves as the most critical limiting and enabling factor in determining success or failure in a project.

Research spans popular science, culture, academia, interviews and lived experiences.  

The book itself is developing around 5 key concepts.

First. To innovate is to challenge entropy. To challenge entropy is a part of the human condition. 

Second. Innovation always carries a manageable cost (financial, social, reputation) in relation to ambition (understood as distance from the status quo).

Third. All innovations are bound by a frontier (where cost and ambition intersect) That frontier is governed by the 3 key dynamics: appetite for risk, ability to collaborate and trust.

Fourth. Trust is not an abstraction. It is something that can be understood empirically.

Fifth. Individual and Team trust can be modelled and managed.

Current Status: The book is divided by descriptive and a prescriptive halves. The descriptive half (research, interviews, and formulating/testing assumptions) is nearing completion. The back half of the book is designed as a source of application by practitioners.