You can communicate with someone twenty times a day and still have very little relational trust.

Because humans don't collaborate through information exchange alone.

Our nervous systems are constantly scanning for cues from the people and environments around us. One influential framework for understanding this is neuroscientist Stephen Porges' concept of neuroception: the idea that the nervous system evaluates cues of safety and danger without requiring conscious awareness, helping regulate whether we remain open to social engagement or shift toward defensive responses.

In other words, somewhere beneath the Teams messages, project plans and perfectly sensible spreadsheets, we're continually answering our internal threat detector:

Is this person, interaction or environment safe, or do I need to protect myself?

And this matters for business because trust determines whether information moves freely through an organization or gets stuck in silos. Research on virtual teams has found that trust in coworkers is positively related to knowledge sharing, with psychological safety playing an important role in that relationship.

After 12 years of working with organizations, I've come to think about it this way:

Every organization regulates attention.

• In psychologically safe cultures, attention flows toward the work.

• In threatening cultures, attention flows toward self-protection.

Research on interpersonal trust offers an interesting parallel: trust appears to influence performance partly by shaping where group members direct their energy and how that energy translates into productive group processes.

So, as a nervous-system-informed organizational developer, I'm interested in two questions:

1. Does this environment repeatedly give people enough signals of trust, predictability and belonging to engage with one another rather than shift to protection mode?

2. If not, how much organizational performance are we sacrificing because people spend their energy managing perceived threats instead of solving business problems?