If doubt begets belief, then vulnerability is essential for trust.

We build on strengths, but beliefs start with doubts. For teams to perform at higher levels, members need to have the courage to take risks, safe in the knowledge of their own vulnerability – in other words, to build trust from the ground up.

In his famous book “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” Patrick Lencioni outlines the root causes of teams’ inability to realise their optimum potential, and he puts absence of trust at the base of the pyramid:
  

1.       Absence of trust

2.       Fear of conflict

3.       Lack of commitment

4.       Avoidance of team accountability

5.       Inattention to team objectives

As for Descartes, he doubted all his beliefs to see which ones he could be certain were true, or to trust his beliefs if you like. We need to apply this method when building teams to help members realise their full potential. It has been argued that what Descartes really meant by “I think therefore I am” was “I doubt therefore I exist.” The very act of doubting one's own existence serves as a proof of the reality of it, or at least of one's thought. Some say this argument has become the foundation for all knowledge. We can apply Descartes “discourse of the method” to the exercise of building trust among team members by starting with, what I would like to call:

The Declaration of Team Trust.

You see, the beauty of Descartes model is that it starts from scratch, from the ground up, and deconstructs every belief to sort out what’s true and what’s not. Similarly, with Lencioni’s model, trust, being the base of the pyramid and the foundation of a high-performing team, to build it out we need to recognise team members’ vulnerability. We also need to ensure that we will have safety net(s) in place to try out new things and fail-safe when things don’t work out as planned.

As a suggestion for the Declaration, we can ask team members to sign a sort of a social contract for the newly formed team (or newcomer members) using the opening lines in Descartes’ “Meditations” - with some adaptations:

“We might have in the past accepted many false opinions about other team members as being true. Consequently, what we afterward based on such principles was highly doubtful. Going forward, we commit to getting rid of all the opinions we had adopted, and of commencing anew the work of building our team trust from the foundation.”