# Two halves of trust *Build both kinds, or watch good decisions die in transit.* --- You're in the quarterly leadership meeting. Eight people around the table, and the CEO has tabled the question everyone's been circling for months: your flagship product is underpriced relative to the value it delivers, and the renewal cycle in six weeks is the window to move. The commercial lead opens with customer data. Usage is up forty per cent year on year. Churn is low. Comparable products in adjacent markets charge twenty to thirty per cent more. She recommends a fifteen per cent price increase on renewals, phased over two cycles. The room goes quiet. The head of customer success shifts in his chair. The VP of sales stares at the table. Someone mentions "the Kershaw situation," a large account that threatened to leave eighteen months ago over a much smaller change, and the energy drains out of the room. The CEO asks for a show of hands. Nobody objects. The decision is made. Fifteen per cent, phased. --- Three months later, nothing has happened. The renewal communications went out with the old pricing. When you ask the commercial lead, she says the product team never updated the packaging tiers to reflect the new structure. Product says they were waiting on finance to confirm margin thresholds. Finance says they sent the thresholds two weeks after the meeting but never heard back. Sales, meanwhile, quietly told three key accounts the old pricing would hold "as a courtesy" and didn't log it anywhere. The CEO is frustrated. The decision was clear. Everyone agreed. The problem, as far as anyone can tell, is execution. --- Look at the meeting again. The head of customer success said nothing, though he manages the accounts most likely to push back. The VP of sales nodded along, then went back to her team and preserved the status quo. The person who raised the Kershaw situation dropped it as an anecdote, not a concern, because raising it as a concern would have meant disagreeing with the CEO in front of the room. Nobody lied. Nobody refused. They just didn't say what they actually thought. The debate that needed to happen, the one where someone says "I think this will cost us two of our top ten accounts and here's why," never took place. The decision was made on incomplete information because the room lacked the safety to surface the risks. This is one half of trust: the willingness to be honest with each other. To say the awkward thing, challenge the assumption, admit the doubt. Without it, meetings produce consensus that looks solid and collapses on contact with reality. --- Suppose the meeting had gone differently. Suppose the head of customer success had laid out his concerns. Suppose the VP of sales had said, plainly, that three accounts were fragile and a blanket increase would trigger conversations she'd rather have on her own terms. Suppose the room had argued for forty minutes, landed on a tiered approach with a higher increase for new business and a smaller one for at-risk renewals, and left with genuine alignment. A better decision. Harder to reach, but owned by the people who have to carry it out. Now watch what happens next. The commercial lead sends the agreed pricing tiers to product. Product updates the packaging, but the billing system can't handle tiered renewal pricing without a manual override, and nobody flagged this in the meeting because nobody from operations was in the room. Finance confirms the margin thresholds, but the confirmation sits in a shared inbox that the product lead doesn't check. Sales has the new tiers but no talking points for the customer conversations, and no clarity on who owns the messaging for the at-risk accounts. Six weeks pass. The renewal window opens. Half the accounts get the new pricing. The other half get a confused mix of old and new because the manual overrides weren't completed in time. The VP of sales, who fought hard for the tiered approach, discovers that the accounts she specifically flagged were handled by a junior rep who didn't know about the exception. The candour was real. The decision was sound. The system around it failed. --- This is the other half of trust: confidence that the organisation's systems will carry a decision through. That accountability and authority sit in the same place. That when the meeting ends and people go back to their desks, the infrastructure exists to turn agreement into action. It includes unglamorous things: clear ownership of next steps, systems that can handle the thing you've decided, communication channels that actually reach the people who need to act, and escalation paths for the problems that surface during implementation. When these are missing, even a well-debated, genuinely aligned decision dies in the gap between the meeting room and the billing system. The frustrating part is how invisible this failure mode is. The CEO sees a decision that was made and not executed. The obvious conclusion is that people didn't follow through. The less obvious one is that the organisation offered no reliable path from decision to implementation. The scaffolding failed the decision, not the people. --- The two halves feed each other, and the failure compounds in both directions. When the system regularly drops decisions, people stop fighting for them. The VP of sales who argued passionately for the tiered approach watches it get botched in implementation. Next quarter, when the CEO tables another pricing question, she nods along and says nothing. Why invest the emotional cost of a real debate if the outcome will be mangled anyway? Weak systems erode candour over time. People learn that honesty doesn't pay because nothing changes regardless of what they say. It runs the other way too. When the room lacks candour, the decisions that enter the system are fragile. They're built on incomplete information, on risks nobody surfaced, on assumptions nobody tested. The implementation team discovers the problems the leadership team should have debated, and they discover them in the worst possible way: mid-execution, without authority to change course. They start building in their own contingencies, hedging quietly, waiting to see if the decision will be reversed once the real situation becomes clear. The system looks unreliable, but the root cause is upstream, in a meeting room where nobody said what they meant. --- Back to your pricing decision. What would it take for both halves to hold? The first half requires something uncomfortable: a meeting culture where the CEO's opening question doesn't function as a conclusion. Where the head of customer success can say "I think we'll lose accounts" without it being received as disloyalty. Where the VP of sales can disagree without hedging it as a hypothetical. This is harder to build than it sounds, because [[Psycho-Logic|the reasons people stay silent]] are rarely about the topic at hand. They're about what happens to them if they're wrong, or if they're right in a way that embarrasses someone senior. [[The identity constraint]] runs underneath: people need to see themselves as the kind of team that argues well, not the kind that falls into line. The second half requires something unglamorous: someone in that meeting asking who owns implementation, what systems need to change, and where the decision is likely to get stuck. It requires the billing system to handle tiered pricing before the renewal window opens, not after. It requires the talking points to exist before the first customer call, not as a scramble the night before. It requires someone with the authority to make the manual overrides actually making them, and someone checking that they did. Neither half is sufficient on its own. Candour without structure gives you the best-debated decisions in the industry, implemented by accident. Structure without candour gives you a well-oiled machine executing the wrong thing, because nobody mentioned the flaw they could all see. [[Execution trap|The teams that can't seem to execute]] often have one half working and the other missing, and the symptoms look identical from the outside: decisions that were made and never landed. --- The pricing decision eventually goes through, four months late, after a second meeting where the same arguments happen again with less patience and more blame. The CEO wonders aloud whether the leadership team is aligned. They were aligned. They just lacked, at different moments, the two things alignment requires: the honesty to make the decision well, and the machinery to make it stick. ---