Trust isn’t built by avoiding difficulty — it’s built by going through difficulty together and coming out the other side feeling like better people who made a better decision. At ONA, the most trust-building moments were the hardest: the 30% layoff, the product architecture pivot, the company rename.
Three elements create this trust: running toward friction (not avoiding it), transparency (sharing board packs with the whole company, using RFCs for major decisions), and clear decision ownership (someone must ultimately decide — decisions by committee slow you down).
Johannes describes how council sessions — where leadership brought their triggers and conflicts into a structured weekend — produced results that looked from the outside like relationship destruction but felt from the inside like 3x more trust. The verbatim quotes sounded alarming; the outcomes were transformative.
“If a team can go into difficulty and then come out feeling like they’re better people or they’ve made a better decision, trust gets built.”
Related Concepts
- Safety comes from working through conflict
- Run toward friction, not away from it
- “Open the drawer” as cultural practice