Trust Spaces (with Rachel Botsman): Designing the Conditions for Trust

Space for Trust
In this episode of Spatial Attraction, Kursty Groves is in conversation with Rachel Botsman about how trust has been reorganised over time, and what that means for the spaces we work inside now. Together, they explore how trust is shaped by the conditions people are working inside, and how uncertainty, discomfort and friction interact with visibility, proximity and format to subtly influence who is heard, believed, and relied upon.

For companion notes and research links, visit the episode page: https://kurstygroves.com/podcast/spatial-attraction-trust-spaces/

About Rachel Botsman

Rachel Botsman is a leading global expert on trust and the author of What’s Mine Is Yours, Who Can You Trust?, and How To Trust & Be Trusted. Her work explores how trust is formed, tested, and redesigned as society, technology, and institutions change.

She has advised and spoken to organisations including Salesforce, Goldman Sachs, Adobe, Gartner, and EY, and was the first Trust Fellow at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School.

Rachel has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, Wired, Financial Times, Time, and Fast Company.

Rethink with Rachel is Rachel’s thought-provoking newsletter on trust, leadership, and change, read by leaders, founders, and decision-makers worldwide.

Chapters

• 0:00 Tempo: 120.0

Transcript

Kursty Groves: 0:15

There's a particular feeling that shows up in some work conversations. You join a meeting for the first time. It's virtual. Faces assemble into a grid. Someone adjusts their headphones. Someone else is clearly finishing something off-screen. Two of the most senior people arrive with their cameras off. No comment, no explanation. The agenda moves on, updates circulate. Then a question is asked. Someone unmutes, then hesitates. You have something important to add, but you pause and you choose your words selectively, leaving something unsaid. That pause is a calculation about trust. What's strange is where we hold trust back and where we give it freely. We routinely trust strangers with our homes, with our journeys across cities and countries, with our data. I mean, when was the last time you handed over your personal information to a platform you barely understand? These questions sit at the heart of Rachel Botsman's work.

Rachel Botsman: 1:42

My fascination really began with the very, very early days of platforms and social media. My lens on it was very much about how technology was going to change the way that we trust. And I got drawn very deep into that world of understanding mechanisms of trust enabled by technology. And then, you know, in the last five years, that has changed and it's become much more pooled towards the design world and thinking about systems and how trust forms and how it's destroyed and how the principles of design are so key to that.

Kursty Groves: 2:21

This is Spatial Attraction. I'm Kirsty Groves. And in this episode, we're exploring trust, what it is, why it matters in work today, and how it's shaped by context, conditions, and the spaces we work in. Long before trust became something leaders explicitly talked about, Rachel was paying attention to something else entirely. In the late 2000s, as digital platforms began to reshape how we live and work, she noticed a subtle but radical shift. People were starting to share homes, cars, skills, and resources with people they didn't know. At scale. She coined the term collaborative consumption to describe what was happening. And as she began trying to explain it, one question kept surfacing beneath everything else. Why were people trusting complete strangers with some of their most valuable things? For more than 15 years, Rachel has been fascinated by how trust works, how trust forms, how it moves, and why it holds in some conditions but falters in others. And what she realized early on was that many of the definitions we rely on simply don't hold up. Once uncertainty enters the picture, Rachel has noticed something striking happens.

Rachel Botsman: 3:49

I'd hear a lot this idea that trust was in a state of decline. So when you talk to most people, not even leaders in organizations, and you say, What do you think is happening to trust in the world? they draw like a downward curve, or they just draw a really squiggly mess. Or you'd hear things like, I don't even know how younger generations think about trust, or I don't know who to trust. So it was like trust just had this massive question mark around it. And I thought this is really strange because there's many parts of our lives that we're extremely trusting without thinking about it.

Kursty Groves: 4:26

The iPhone launches, peer-to-peer platforms begin to take hold. Rachel Botsman noticed something curious. People were trusting strangers at scale in ways that hadn't made sense before. The word that kept coming up was trust. But when she started to understand what that actually meant, it proved surprisingly hard to define.

Rachel Botsman: 4:48

When you ask people about trust, and I've asked that question thousands of times, the words that you typically get are expectations and outcomes and certainty. And there are words that are actually more to do with risk than they are to do with trust. I often say there's more definitions of trust than there are of love. So it wasn't like there was a shortage. But um I didn't like those definitions because I would think about what I was seeing, you know, if you think about a very complicated dating platform, right? The trust is in is in the things that you don't see. If you think about trust and AI, it's in the system that you can never understand or that's fully visible. If we think about um really simple example, if you're in an airport, right, and I always I find this amazing where people are like, Can you watch my bag while I go to the toilet, right? Like that's trust. You don't know me, you don't want to happen in that moment, but you trust that it's gonna be okay, right? That's that's the essence of trust.

Kursty Groves: 5:52

Let's go back to that meeting. Same grid of faces, same calendar slot, same slightly awkward opening where everyone waits half a beat too long before speaking. Zoom in, no pun intended, on a few details. One person is backlit by a window, their face just a little harder to read. Another sits very close to the camera, shoulders filling the frame. Someone else has chosen a virtual background, a generic, softly blurred image that doesn't quite align with their outline. No one has spoken yet, but already the room is doing some of the work. Enough, it turns out, to subtly shape how trust begins to form. In 2023, psychologists at Durham University explored whether these kinds of visual choices made any difference at all. Participants were shown short video clips of the same speaker, delivering the same message in the same tone. The only thing that changed was what appeared behind them. In one version, the speaker sat in a real room, a desk, a plant, a bookshelf that looked genuinely used. In another, the space was carefully curated and pristine. In a third, the background was replaced by a standard virtual image. Afterwards, people were asked how trustworthy and competent the speaker seemed, and how confident they felt relying on what was said. The effects were subtle but consistent. Speakers framed by real, plausibly inhabited spaces were rated as more trustworthy and more competent. Those environments offered small but meaningful cues about the person, hints of character, normality, and capability that helped viewers form an initial sense of who they were dealing with. Highly curated backgrounds offer fewer of those cues. Viewers had less to read. Virtual backgrounds reduced that information further. With less to interpret, people felt slightly less certain about the person in front of them. What's interesting is that most participants couldn't say why. They didn't point to the bookshelf, or the blur, or the background at all. They just reported a change in confidence. Back in that meeting, the same process is already underway. Before anyone speaks, people are forming judgments about clarity, credibility, and intent. Not deliberately, not consciously. Trust is being shaped through what the space makes available to read and by what it leaves unresolved. And this helps explain why trust becomes so slippery inside organizations.

Rachel Botsman: 8:31

Organizations that have trust as a value, it's a hard thing to critique because they're saying we want you to put trust first in decisions, that it has a long-term value. So what they're saying to employees is that if you are making a decision, the longer-term value isn't about money, it's about trust, which is fantastic. It's very hard for people to act on it as a value, but it's not a behavioral word. There's behavior is tied to being trustworthy. So integrity is a much, if that's your intention, you can say, right, um, actually, integrity is a value, and we always want you to be thinking about the interests of the company, your interests, and the best interest of the public or the customer and how they all align up. Um, humility is a value, um, reliability, like these, these are all things that enable people to experience or earn trust. But you sort of have to behave in trustworthy ways. And I think also sometimes when trust is up there, organizations try to measure it, and then you end up in all kinds of problems because the trust doesn't like to be measured because it's changing all the time. And what you see in the measurements is essentially organizations trying to prove that trust is okay, and what is often missed is context. So you can have parts and individuals and teams in an organization that are highly trusted around doing certain things, and then parts of your organization that have very low trust. And that's not necessarily a bad and a good thing, but some kind of average metric is it's not getting across the nuances of trust.

Kursty Groves: 10:11

So we end up with a strange situation. Trust matters deeply, but the way we talk about it doesn't help people recognize it in action, practice it deliberately, or respond when it comes under strain. After years of sitting with these contradictions, the definitions that didn't quite fit, the behaviors that didn't quite line up, Rachel realized she needed to stop asking what trust is meant to be and start naming what she was actually seeing.

Rachel Botsman: 10:41

The way I've defined trust, it's quite liminal, actually. The way I define trust is that trust is a confident relationship with the unknown. Um, so trust is a confident relationship with the unknown. And the reason why I love this definition, it is my definition, but I do love it because I think it's it's very different from thinking of trust as a state and a journey and a process versus an attribute or a fixed asset, which or even a value, which is quite problematic. Trust is that glue, it's that enabler that actually allows us to navigate uncertainty and be in the unknown, which is so important for teams and organizations, but it's so important on an individual level when you think about creativity or innovation or the birthplace of design, you have to be in that unknown space. I'm so embarrassed to admit this because I hate cliches, but I was generally watching Sector Soleil. And I mean, I hate this because I hate all images of trust that are like trust falls and stuff like that. But you know, it was watching those acrobats, which and it's the trust is the moment they let go, right? It's that mid-air space that the other person is going to cash them. But it was something about it being this mid-air phenomenon that there was something in that space between a departure point and an arrival that I found really interesting. So starting to think of it more like energy that pushes or pulls people is where the definition came from. So and I should say before I explain these, it's not like one goes away, it's not like they're superseded, they can live in parallel. So the first is is local trust, and that's the easiest to understand because it's when people lived in small villages and communities, and trust at a smaller scale is easier to design, it's easier to experience, it's easier to manage. And this type of trust, it was highly effective. Then we wanted to trade and we wanted to move, and it doesn't work because if you want to trade with someone the other side of the world, you can't rely on local trust. So, you know, institutional trust gets a massive beating these days. But I like to remind people this was an incredible human innovation to go, you don't have to trust someone directly that you know. We can actually invent brands, we can invent contracts, we can invent insurance, we can invent middlemen, we can invent systems like the Postal Service or the NHS, and suddenly trust can travel and scale in these phenomenal ways. Now, that type of trust existed for a very, very long time. And in many ways, it was simpler to understand because it was very top-down and very linear and hierarchical. So if you think about advertising, it was the time when you could put out a campaign and control the message. If you were thinking about an organization, it was when it was a pyramid and the CEO or the expert was at the top. When I sort of really got involved with trust was the explosion, it sounds so crazy now to say, of the internet and smartphones, right? Like boom. And suddenly what it did is it blew this institutional trust up and it distributed it through networks and marketplaces and platforms. And that's what I call distributed trust. And you can look at most industries and they have been transformed. So travel, Airbnb, Uber, things like cryptocurrencies, peer transfers, shopping, of course, every single category, media, information, and also like the design of organizations that no longer did people want to come to work and go, yeah, I report to that person at the top. The trust started to move very sideways. Organizations were just starting to figure it out, like literally after 20 years, and then boom, along comes artificial intelligence. And this is another huge trust shift. Originally I called it auto-sapient, but now I actually'll like augmented trust. And the reason why I think it's more like augmented trust is because it should enhance the experience of human trust versus completely blur that line between someone and something.

Kursty Groves: 15:18

We're living in a world where all of these shifts are still in play: local, institutional, distributed, and now augmented. There hasn't been a neat handover from one kind of trust to another. Most of us move between them every day. We trust differently depending on context, at work, in the systems we rely on, in the places we live, whether that's a village, a neighborhood, or an online community. Sometimes those expectations sit comfortably together, sometimes they don't. So the question becomes: what does trust look like when all of these forces are operating at once?

Rachel Botsman: 15:54

Trust is healthiest when it works in layers of all these things. So you mentioned like you live in a village, right? Like what we're actually seeing is a resurgence of people wanting local trust. They want to feel like they live in a close-knit village or community. Now, not everyone knows how to be a villager. They want to live in a village without being the villager, right? Which is a problem. And being a villager doesn't mean showing up on a WhatsApp group. The reason why I think that's quite important is because that requires friction, it requires human energy, it requires showing up. And similarly, distributed trust, if you don't have any institutional mechanisms, you end up with complete chaos, right? So if there is no basic example, but safety net, when things go wrong, you know, if you stay, if if you stay in an ABM and it's absolute rubbish and there's no insurance policy, you can't just blow that stuff up. But similarly, if you deal with an institution and that institution is so archaic and it hasn't adapted, and there's there's no distributed trust in there. And similarly, in your own life, it's not a bad thing to interact with intelligent tools and that they can exist and augment you. But if you completely live in that world and you don't experience human trust, that's the problem.

Kursty Groves: 17:12

So these are four different ways trust has taken shape, and they're still with us. We still rely on local trust, the trust that forms between people who know each other through familiarity, repeated interaction, and being around one another. We rely on institutional trust, the systems, contracts, brands, and rules that allow us to travel and scale beyond personal relationships. Then, of course, came distributed trust, where platforms and networks use reputation, peer signals, and shared feedback to help strangers cooperate. And more recently, augmented trust, where digital tools and AI sit alongside us, shaping judgment, confidence, and even our decision making. At work, we're operating inside all four at once. They coexist, they overlap, they push and pull on us in different ways. Work brings more trust context into contact than almost anywhere else in our lives. That concentration is demanding, and it's also why work holds so much trust potential. When those contexts are aligned, trust can build quickly. When they're misaligned, trust becomes harder to learn, harder to hold, and harder to repair. That's the terrain we're operating in. We've talked about trust as something relational, shaped by uncertainty and influenced by context. But one assumption that often sips through unnoticed is that if you're good at building trust in one setting, it will travel with you.

Rachel Botsman: 18:47

I think it's really easy to assume that we're all good at creating those trusting relationships and that that transfers in different areas. But I find it very easy to earn trust with clients and with students because I'm conditioned to do that, right? I've been in that situation over and over and over again. So I know how to react, I know how to respond. I'm very sensitive when I walk into a work environment and it's not going to work for a meeting. Like I know what needs to change. Now it's interesting because I now chair this charity board that is a big grassroots organization that is trying to save a massive 1200 square meter area of the park and turn it into this community horticultural hub. Now, what's interesting, I've been working on this for two and a half years, and all my normal ways of working and forming trust, they don't work. And the grassroots organization is so different from the world that I live in, right? So um I have to go like two days ago, I had to sit for two and a half hours in the local town hall AGM with a hundred people and And it's slow, and it is a lot of I understand why people like Obama say start your careers like in grassroots organizations because you you it doesn't work sending people an email, you have to show up. And it's I mean, this this isn't meant to sound arrogant in any way, but you get to a certain place in your career and you walk in and there's a certain level of respect, right? Because in this, no one really cares who you are, right? Or just like the random greenhouse lady. And so it's so good because what's happening is I'm remembering all those nerves and all those feelings. That is exactly how young people feel when they start in any organization, right? Like it's like of course you're gonna hide behind email and messaging and Slack because it's much harder to get off from the computer and go into that environment. If you think about the loss of jobs that we're seeing, right? 20% loss. It's 18 to 24 year olds that it's hitting the hardest. So all those young people coming into organizations that miss those six years of apprenticeship, and they suddenly join your organization at 24, 25, where do they go? They've missed all that training, the way you learn and the way you absorb. And I really believe this in meetings, like how much I've learned through the years just from observing like brilliant leaders, small things, how they say hello, how they stereo meeting when things go off course, how they handle tension, how they create space. That sometimes has to be physically experienced in your body.

Kursty Groves: 21:33

When trust depends on what we can't fully see, the conditions around an interaction start to matter more than we realize. One place this shows up very clearly is in how we meet. Across decades of research in behavioral economics and social psychology, including work from labs at Zurich, Bonn, the Max Planck Institute, and Harvard and MIT, researchers have compared how trust forms in face-to-face, video, audio, and text-based interactions. They use the same kinds of tools each time, social dilemma games. In these experiments, people are given something of real value, often money, and asked to decide how much to contribute to a shared pool. If everyone cooperates, the group does well. If someone holds back while others contribute, they can come out ahead at everyone else's expense. Trust shows up in what people choose to do before they know how others will act. Across these studies, a consistent pattern appears. When people meet in person, cooperation in these games tends to emerge quickly, and once it does, it tends to hold. In video-based interaction, cooperation still forms, but it takes longer. With audio-only interaction, it becomes more fragile, and in text-based interaction, cooperation is slower still and more easily disrupted. What's changing across these settings isn't people's willingness to trust, it's the amount of shared information they have to work with. In physical settings, people are supported by a shared environment. They can see reactions as they happen, they can register hesitation, alignment, discomfort, often without naming it. Once we're no longer in the same physical space, fewer of those cues travel with us. Facial information drops away, timing becomes harder to read, silence carries more ambiguity, small delays take on extra meaning. People still try to make sense of what's happening, but with fewer cues, they have to fill in more of the story themselves. That's where second guessing creeps in. That's where interpretation starts to do more of the work. It's not necessarily about asking people to make a bigger leap. It's about how much support the environment gives them in navigating uncertainty and how much room there is for misreading when that support is thin. So proximity really does matter for learning and trust. It gives people more to work with in the moment. But what happens when leaders reach for it because they don't trust people in the first place?

Rachel Botsman: 24:12

You're doomed before you begin, right? And you have to be honest yourself, like if it really is genuinely coming from that place where we don't trust what people are doing at home, or we do have a culture of micromanagement and therefore it's really hard to let go, that's very if you really believe that in your heart, right? That's very different from leaders that I've met, that we are better together, right? That is that is very different. So I think the thing that often goes wrong at the first hurdle, which is what is the intention behind that, and being really clear and honest as a team about that intention. And if it's we got to fix trust issues, because where people are at is not going to fix that issue, right? Like location isn't the answer, which is why, you know, teams that were high trust teams, which was very few and far between, the format almost didn't matter, right? It could flex and bend. So I think what's happened is leaders and organizations have expected fairly low trust cultures where it hasn't been nurtured to be able to tolerate all these adaptations. And now it's just stretched so thin that it's breaking on both sides. Um, this is hard for both sides. Like I I really feel for leaders of large organizations, the the amount of I hate even using this word, but uncertainty, the amount they're having to offer adapt.

Kursty Groves: 25:33

Much of that strain traces back to how trust was handled during the pandemic. It was extended quickly, often generously, as people adapted at speed. What wasn't yet visible was what that version of trust would require over time, or how it would need to be reset once circumstances changed.

Rachel Botsman: 25:50

I think a second thing that has has risen up, and and some people say this is to do with the notion of work changing in people's lives, which it which it has, um, and value and values, but boundaries have really changed, and and this is something that didn't get reset is that when we all moved home and worked from home, um, it was seen as compassion, right, to blur those personal and professional boundaries. And you have teenage children, um, this is no different. Like you need to sometimes push against something hard, and um even though trust is in that liminal space, it also likes consistency and it also likes stability, and it also likes being very clear around expectations. So I think a lot of cultures are suffering because you know what is personal and what is private, and what do you leave at home and what do you bring to work, and all of that is very messy and grey. So it's to answer your question, I think it's it's a problem when the notion of frictionless design, which is sort of often the compass in products and services and experiences, is translated into culture. Like frictionless culture is is not the same as frictionless design of your product, which is I think the tension that we see happening.

Kursty Groves: 27:56

So when friction is present, what are people actually looking for to decide whether it's safe to trust?

Rachel Botsman: 28:02

The way we decide whether to give trust in different situations, particularly high-risk situations, um, is through signals. And some of those signals are um conscious and visible and behavioral, so it they're not all necessarily good. So some signals are about familiarity, right? It's just someone feels familiar, we tend to give our trust more easily, which is why when you're in a conversation, you often anchor the start of the conversation around things like sports or where you went to school or what job you do, you're like looking for those familiarity signals. What happens often in the digital space, so if you think about an email and that email comes in the wrong period of the day, or something context around that, you fill in the narrative, right? You fill in the story around that. Don't get me wrong, like I'm all for digital communications, I sound like a complete ludder. I'm not, it's that what often happens in organizations is you can see trust fraying in teams and relationships, and they don't recognize when they have to get offline and just have a meeting to talk it through. So you see this in simple email exchange, right? Where the misunderstanding comes in and then you get the heated response. And the most simple thing to do is like call the meeting, right? Stop the email chain. That's leadership. Leadership isn't replying and keeping that sort of unraveling happening. So um that's why you to operate like completely virtually with people, which I do with some relationships, it it's very hard to do that until the trust is formed.

Kursty Groves: 29:53

And this runs deeper than digital trust alone. It touches on how people are being with each other.

Rachel Botsman: 29:59

People have just got less tolerant of people. And I'm not talking about in a political sense, I'm just talking about friction, energy. You know, I've seen young people where they're like, I can't sit in the classroom because I just feel really drained, or I can't sit through that meeting. And they're what they're saying, that experience of not denying that they're not feeling that, but that's because people they didn't leave and now they don't go out because everything that you did go out for, you can now do at home. And so this is such a systemic societal problem of you know, they say it's FOMO gone to FOGO, fear of going out, and just that where all those basic human interactions have come from, and then coming out of university and then going into the workplace, and that it's just basic human capabilities have been denied, and then you expect those people to function in a team in multiple formats.

Kursty Groves: 30:58

So where does that leave us? If trust is learned through exposure, strained by context and weakened when the conditions around it erode, then the question becomes what kind of spaces actually support trust?

Rachel Botsman: 31:12

I've never actually defined a trust space, um but I think it's if you're trying to create a space for trust, it's very much about designing a space, an environment where you can hold things. Um so you can hold discomfort, you can hold safety, you can hold um lots and lots of different opinions, and and very few spaces are designed like that. Think about a very high trust situation, like a therapist's office, and how simple that format usually is, right? Usually therapists at the front, you in some kind of chair, there's some kind of nice view and a box of tissues, right? It's it's very similar, but it's intentionally designed in that way, so there is space between you and the therapist. There's not a lot going on in the room to hold that conversation. Now I'm not saying all workplaces should be like therapist offices, but um, you know, how intentional you are that you're creating some kind of trust space to hold that. It doesn't happen in a room where it's a big ball table where there's two meters between you, someone's sitting at the top, the junior person sitting at the yen, you've got a massive bright screen, but right now let's talk about what's going on in this team.

Kursty Groves: 32:35

What starts to matter here is the balance a space strikes. People need enough predictability for a situation to make sense, to know where they are, what's expected of them, and how to act within it. But something else also needs to be present. A signal that a different kind of contribution is possible here. When a space feels too unexpected, people stay guarded. When it feels overly routine, people stay on autopilot. Trust seems to grow in spaces that sit between these two, recognizable enough to orient behavior and distinct enough to invite people to show up differently.

Rachel Botsman: 33:11

It's a principle in trust psychology we call strangely familiar. So if you're trying to get people to try a new product, it can't feel too the same because then you're like, what's the point of taking a risk? But if it feels too far foreign, they won't take that leap. So you design it to make it feel strangely familiar. So with ice cream, like if they use a weird ingredient, they might put it with vanilla or something like that. You can apply the same principle, you're absolutely right, to like office environments. Like you don't want to walk in and it feels like your lounge at home, which is where I think we went wrong with all that like casual workplace design. But at the same time, like there has to be intrigue and curiosity, and you walk into that space and you're like, oh, I just feel different in here. And in some way, it opens you up to a new or a different conversation. And so I think too many, this sounds like such an oxymoron, but too many organizations have been designed for comfort and being comfortable versus discomfort and being uncomfortable in a really healthy way, that you you still feel safe and you still feel trusted, but it brings something out that is different in you.

Kursty Groves: 34:19

And this is where trust and creativity operationally meet. What Rachel's describing changes how people enter a situation. In my work with leaders and teams, I often talk about the difference between stretch and panic. Stretch is where learning happens. Panic is where people narrow their attention and manage risk. Environments play a decisive role in where that line sits. When unfamiliar territory is supported through structure, cues, and clarity, people are more able to stretch. When those supports are weak or inconsistent, people conserve energy instead. That's why space matters so much. Before anyone speaks, people are already reading the room. Who speaks first? Where power sits, how exposed uncertainty feels. Those signals shape whether people lean forward, hold back, or stay neutral. What starts to matter once you notice this is the role space is playing in shaping that reading, often before intention has a chance to register. Trust develops when people can read a situation, when they can sense what's expected, what's safe, and how others are likely to respond. As that reading becomes more demanding, people allocate more attention to self-monitoring and protection. Space plays a central role in that process through cues, signals, and how uncertainty is experienced in the body. So here's what I'm taking away when it comes to trust seen through five spatial lenses. In physical space, trust is shaped by what people can immediately read, whether the setting feels intentional or cared for, or neglected and unpredictable, and whether it's clear what's allowed, what can be moved, what can be used, who sits where, who has positional control, who can see whom when they speak. These cues shape how willing people are to stay present and to contribute when uncertainty enters the picture. In digital space, trust is shaped by how interaction is structured and governed. Timing, tone, visibility, responsiveness. Who is visible and who isn't, who controls the agenda, the mute button, the chat, the screen, how quickly questions are acknowledged, how silence is treated, the gap between messages. These cues shape how people interpret delay, ambiguity, and intent when shared context is thin. In social space, trust takes shape through patterned behaviour between people. Turn taking, interruption, repair, follow-through. Who gets airtime? Who is interrupted, and by whom. What happens when someone disagrees, how tension is handled once it appears. Over time, these patterns teach people what is welcome, what carries risk, and how much of themselves they can bring into the interaction. In cognitive space, the headspace available for thinking and judgment, trust is shaped by load, clarity, pace, coherence, capacity. How much people are asked to hold in mind at once, how clear or shifting expectations are, how quickly decisions are pushed, how often people have to switch focus, tools, or frames. These conditions shape whether people can track nuance, make sense together, and stay open rather than narrow. And in temporal space, the time dimension of work, trust is shaped by continuity, rhythm, sequencing, repair windows. How often people interact, how much continuity exists between conversations, how quickly issues are addressed, whether repair happens while things still matter. These cues shape whether trust can accumulate, stabilize, and deepen over time. Taken together, this is the work trust spaces do. They help people engage with uncertainty, they help people stay present through discomfort, they support forward movement together. Whether intentionally or not, they are always doing that work. Designing spaces for trust begins with noticing. Noticing the cues people are already reading, and then choosing the ones we want to reinforce. And if you have a moment, a rating or review really helps new listeners find us. Links to guest info and research are in the show notes. If you'd like to share a thought or a question, you can find me on LinkedIn or Instagram. Just search Kirsty Groves or Spatial Attraction. See you next time.