Trust is antifragile

Trust is foundational to any healthy relationship, personal or professional.

Because of this, people tend to idealise trust as something that's unwavering. In reality, trust is messy. It will be tested, often unintentionally. If you expect people to never surprise you, you'll conclude nobody can be trusted.

A mismatch in expectations – or even a conflict – can build alignment if both sides are seeking the best outcome for the relationship.

Perhaps trust is best understood as an antifragile system:

"Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better."

—Nassim Nicholas Taleb

You won't build trust through volatility, randomness, disorder and stressors alone. No point inflicting them intentionally. The opposite works better early on: predictability, order, motivators. But it's naive to think trust will never be tested.

While trust is a response to trustworthiness, healthy relationships grow stronger through unexpected adversity. Trust is antifragile.