We keep talking about trust, but are we creating the conditions for it?

I've been thinking a lot about trust lately. Not in an abstract, governance-policy kind of way. In the kind of way that keeps you turning something over on your drive home, after school pick up.

I've sat in a lot of governance meetings over the years. I've helped develop strategic plans for universities where I experienced firsthand how hard it is for boards and councils to move together. Smart, committed people, often with genuinely shared values, finding it surprisingly difficult to build the kind of trust that makes good strategy possible. Not because they didn't want to. But because the conditions for trust were never really created.

That experience came back to me while reading Priya Parker's The Art of Gathering. Parker's core argument is deceptively simple: most gatherings fail not because of bad content, but because of a lack of purpose. We convene people without asking why, or we hide behind format and agenda rather than doing the harder work of deciding what this gathering is actually for. The result is meetings that feel busy but leave people unchanged.

I think about how often this describes board strategy sessions. Attendees arrive with briefing papers. Someone presents a PESTLE analysis. There's a working lunch. A facilitator walks the group through a template. And everyone leaves having technically completed a strategic planning process, while still not quite trusting each other enough to say what they actually think.

This is the governance challenge of 2026, and AI has made it more urgent, not less.

Artificial intelligence is reshaping almost every operating context boards are responsible for. The pace of that change is genuinely disorienting. Organisations that don't engage with AI risk irrelevance. Organisations that adopt it without thinking risk eroding the very trust that holds their stakeholder relationships together. Both things are true, and holding that tension requires boards that can think together, not just report to each other.

And yet the conversation about AI in governance keeps defaulting to risk registers and policy frameworks. Which matters. But it skips the prior question: do the people in this room trust each other enough to be honest about what they don't know? Can they sit with genuine uncertainty together? Can they disagree productively when the stakes are high and the answers aren't clear?

That's a question about the quality of the gathering, not the quality of the governance documentation.

Parker talks about the role of a good host: someone who creates the conditions for something real to happen, rather than just managing the logistics of people being in the same room. That idea translates directly to board facilitation. The difference between a strategic planning process that produces a living document and one that produces a PDF no one reads is almost always about whether genuine connection and honest conversation were made possible.

This is work we care about deeply at Ethicol. We facilitate board strategy workshops designed not just to produce plans, but to build the trust and shared understanding that make those plans worth having. We ask the questions that don't usually make it onto the agenda. We create the conditions for boards to think together, to surface disagreement early, and to find the kind of clarity that only comes from genuine engagement.

The organisations that will navigate the next decade well won't just have the best strategy documents. They'll have the most honest rooms.

What does yours look like?