Express Trust Diagnosis Based on Symptoms

A facilitated conversation from the original April 2025 article. It helps identify issues for discussion; it is not a validated test or an objective score of team trust.

Start with what people can observe

Trust can be difficult to discuss in the abstract. The Trust Anti-Patterns cards give participants concrete behaviours to consider: excessive checking, withheld information, blame or conversations behind people’s backs.

The format is designed for roughly 5–15 participants. Allow about 25–35 minutes for the sequence below, and more time if important disagreements emerge. The original’s individual stage estimates add up to 26–31 minutes, so a strict 20-minute promise would be misleading.

Prepare the conversation

You need the cards, a board or flipchart and three voting tokens or sticky notes per participant. Agree on respectful participation and how observations will be recorded. Focus on work situations and behaviours rather than labelling people.

Five stages

1. Introduce the purpose · 3 minutes

Explain that the group is looking for signs that make collaboration harder. People may see the same situation differently; that difference is information for discussion.

2. Reflect individually · 5 minutes

Give each participant two or three cards. Ask them to keep one or two whose symptoms they recognise in current work and prepare a concrete example.

3. Share and cluster · 7 minutes

Invite participants to name their selected symptoms. Group similar observations on the board: information problems, blame, excessive control or gossip. A limited random selection of cards cannot represent every issue in a team.

4. Prioritise impact · 5 minutes

Give everyone three votes. Participants may put all votes on one issue or distribute them. Voting indicates what this group wants to address first; it does not prove the cause or severity of a problem.

5. Interpret and close · 6–11 minutes

Discuss the leading issues. What have people observed? What effects have followed? What is still an assumption? Record one next action, its owner and when the group will review it.

Use the result well

The outcome is a shared list of concerns and priorities for further work. Repeating the conversation can show how participants’ perceptions change, but do not interpret voting totals as a precise trust trend. Preserve room for disagreement, especially for participants who do not feel safe speaking publicly.