Trust Cannot Be Summoned Back Into Life

Published on August 11, 2026

By Steve Carter.

Thinking more ecologically about trust, agency and resilience

The ABP Industry Insights Report on trust, work and organisational systems arrives at an important moment. Many organisations are operating in a world where trust can no longer be assumed, inherited or declared into existence. It has become more conditional, more localised and more dependent on whether people’s everyday experience of work matches the organisation’s stated intent.

Trust is often spoken about as though it is primarily a leadership quality, a cultural aspiration, or a communication challenge. Leaders are encouraged to “build trust”, “restore trust” or “communicate trust”. These things matter. But the ABP report points towards something deeper: trust is increasingly experienced through systems. People judge whether they can trust an organisation not only by what leaders say, but by how decisions are made, how policies are applied, how technology is used, how uncertainty is handled, and whether the organisation’s actions feel coherent over time.

If trust is system-shaped, it cannot be repaired by messaging alone. Trust re-emerges when the conditions of work become trustworthy.

The Psychological Ecosystem of Trust

This connects with a line of thinking I have been developing around the idea of the psychological ecosystem: the living pattern created between people and the environments in which they operate. Human behaviour at work is not simply produced inside the individual, nor is it determined entirely by the organisation. It emerges in the relationship between the person and the field around them.

This matters because we often try to solve organisational problems at the wrong level. We notice withdrawal, cynicism, caution, burnout, or loss of initiative, and then locate the problem in the person. We ask whether they are engaged enough, resilient enough or sufficiently committed to change. Sometimes those are legitimate questions. But they are rarely sufficient ones.

If people are operating in a psychological ecosystem where openness is unsafe, effort is not reciprocated, decisions are opaque, technology feels intrusive, or the formal story of the organisation does not match lived reality, then mistrust is not an attitude problem. It is information. It is the system speaking through the people who inhabit it.

Trust is not a separate “thing” that can be inserted into an organisation. It is an emergent property of the whole psychological ecosystem. It grows where people experience enough consistency, fairness, openness, agency, and connection to risk honest participation. It weakens where the system repeatedly teaches them that caution is wiser than candour.

When Resilience Becomes Endurance

The same is true of resilience. In many organisations, resilience has too often been framed as an individual capacity to cope with pressure. That framing has value, but it is incomplete. If the surrounding system is incoherent, mistrustful or over-controlling, asking people to be resilient can become another burden. It may invite endurance rather than adaptation.

I use the phrase natural resilience to describe something different: the capacity of people and systems to remain alive, responsive and adaptive under changing conditions. Natural resilience is not simply bouncing back. It is the ability to move through disturbance, learn from it, and reorganise without losing vitality. It depends not only on personal toughness, but on whether the environment affords enough room for agency, connection, experiment, and recovery.

There is a world of difference between merely surviving a depleted system and adapting intelligently within a living one. The first may look resilient from a distance. People keep going. They absorb pressure. But the cost may be hidden in reduced imagination, diminished trust, emotional withdrawal, or a narrowing of what they believe is possible. Natural resilience is not grim persistence. It is adaptive vitality.

The Rewilding Connection

This is where psychological rewilding may offer a useful metaphor. In ecological rewilding, the aim is not to micromanage every outcome, but to restore the conditions in which living systems can become more diverse, self-regulating, and adaptive. Applied carefully to organisational life, psychological rewilding does not mean abandoning structure or romanticising chaos. It asks whether our systems have become so over-managed, over-specified, or over-controlled that they are suppressing the human capacities they now need most.

It invites organisations to:

Protect psychological diversity rather than force people into narrow behavioural scripts;
Allow more natural processes of initiative, recovery, learning, and self-organisation;
Reintroduce intelligent risk where excessive caution has become paralysing;
Ease controls that have outlived their usefulness; and
Reconnect people with one another, with purpose, and with the living realities of the work itself.

Psychological rewilding is not an argument for less organisation, but for more life within the organisation.

When trust is low, organisations often respond with more control: more reporting, more surveillance, more sign-off, more dashboards, more compliance rituals. These may be understandable responses to uncertainty, but they can deepen the problem. Increased control can reduce autonomy. Reduced autonomy can weaken trust. The organisation then interprets disengagement as further evidence that more control is needed.

A psychologically rewilding approach would interrupt that cycle. It would ask different questions.

Where are people being unnecessarily constrained?
Where have policies replaced judgement?
Where are managers carrying accountability without agency?
Where has technology made work more visible but less understood?
Where has the organisation confused standardisation with coherence?

The practical work is not to remove all control, but to distinguish between structure that enables life and structure that suppresses it. Healthy ecosystems are not structureless. They have patterns, boundaries, feedback loops, and interdependence. But they also have variety, movement, and local intelligence.

Conclusion

Trust cannot be summoned back into life by exhortation. Agency cannot be created by slogan. Resilience cannot be produced by asking people to endure more gracefully. They re-emerge when the conditions are right.

The question for organisations is not simply “How do we build trust?” It is more fundamental: What sort of organisational ecosystem are we asking people to live and work within?

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About the Author

Steve Carter is an award-winning Business Psychologist, author and speaker with over 30 years’ experience working internationally with leaders, teams and organisations. His current work brings together systems thinking, resilience, Psychological Rewilding and the idea of the psychological ecosystem: the living relationship between people and the environments in which they work and live. He is particularly interested in how organisations can create the conditions for trust, agency, adaptation and natural resilience to re-emerge. Steve is currently developing this work through doctoral research at Swansea University. His latest book, How to Survive and Thrive in an Impossible World, explores how people can recover their innate capacity to adapt, reconnect and live meaningfully in difficult times.