Trust doesn’t usually announce when it’s about to break.

This week in regional Victoria, it arrived without announcement. On Wednesday 8 July 2026, a timing fault in several Telstra network nodes halted every V/Line regional train in the state. Not one route. All of them. V/Line is the regional rail network connecting communities across Victoria to Melbourne; it relies on Telstra’s mobile network for train-to-control-centre communications. Services were suspended from 4:30am until midday Thursday. Ballarat, Geelong, Bendigo, every community connecting to Melbourne, without rail access for nearly two days. (Transport Victoria; The Courier, Ballarat)

V/Line didn’t fail. Telstra did. And regional Victoria’s rail network, running on a communications dependency most passengers had no reason to know existed, came to a complete stop.

That story has a direct line to the most important number in this year’s Edelman Trust Barometer. Not the low number. The high one.

Seventy-eight per cent of employees globally say they trust their employer. That’s the highest figure of any institution Edelman measures: higher than government, higher than media, higher than NGOs. When leaders see that number, most of them feel relief. Some use it in presentations. A few put it in board reports as evidence that the people strategy is working.

What it actually is, is a warning.

Because this is one of the defining patterns of organisational trust collapse: it doesn’t arrive as a crisis. It arrives after a period of apparent health. The number is high, the engagement scores look good, the surveys are encouraging. And then something happens that reveals what was true underneath the whole time. The fall is rapid.

I’ve been thinking about trust as a cliff rather than a slope for some years now. The framework I call Trust Cliffs starts from a simple observation: trust doesn’t erode gradually the way most models assume. It accumulates quietly, sometimes for years, and then it collapses suddenly at a speed that leaves organisations completely unprepared. The signals are there before the fall. They’re just not the ones leaders are looking at.

The 78% figure is one of them.

When engagement is not loyalty

In May 2023, Starbucks’ mobile ordering app experienced a widespread outage. For a company that had built its growth strategy significantly around digital convenience (by that point, mobile orders accounted for roughly a third of US transactions) the disruption was significant. What happened next was instructive.

A substantial proportion of mobile customers didn’t walk into the store and order at the counter instead. They didn’t go to the competitor down the street. They simply didn’t buy coffee that day. In some cases, for several days. The app’s return brought most of them back. But the pattern had revealed something that was invisible when the app was working perfectly.

The relationship wasn’t with the coffee. It wasn’t with the brand. It was with the convenience.

When the convenience disappeared, the relationship disappeared with it. Not because customers were angry. Not because they felt betrayed. But because the daily habit that felt like loyalty turned out to be a delivery mechanism. The app removed the friction; without the app, the friction returned; and the friction was, it turned out, the only thing standing between Starbucks and “not today.”

Not loyalty. Not preference. Convenience.

I think about this case often when I’m looking at employee trust data. Because the same mechanism operates inside organisations. The trust that reads as 78% in the Edelman headline is real, but the question worth asking is: what’s it built on? What does it rest on, underneath the positive survey response? And is that foundation solid, or is it the organisational equivalent of a mobile app that’s been working without interruption long enough to feel permanent?

The Edelman data offers a partial answer, and it’s more unsettling than the headline figure suggests.

Seventy per cent of respondents say they’re unwilling to trust people who hold significantly different values from their own. Forty-two per cent say they would change departments or leave the organisation entirely over values misalignment. The trust that reads as 78% in the headline isn’t unconditional. It’s contextual. It exists in the current conditions, in the current relationship, with the current understanding of what the organisation stands for.

What changes the trust picture is a decision that signals values drift, a restructure that feels like betrayal, a response to controversy that reveals what leadership actually prioritises. In those moments, the trust that looked so solid doesn’t erode. It falls.

That’s the cliff.

What Trust Cliffs actually reveals

The Trust Cliffs framework starts from the observation that we’ve been using the wrong model to think about how trust works in organisations. The dominant assumption in leadership development and most HR frameworks is that trust is cumulative and progressive. You build it over time, layer by layer. It increases incrementally when things go well and decreases incrementally when things go wrong. Damage it too much and it breaks. The implication is that as long as you’re not doing anything dramatically wrong, you’re fine.

That model is reassuring. It’s also not accurate.

What actually happens is different. Trust tends to accumulate and then plateau. People decide (usually quickly, often unconsciously) whether they trust an organisation, a leader, a relationship. Once that decision is made, it’s stable even in the face of minor problems. You can make mistakes, miss targets, have difficult quarters, and the trust holds because the underlying assessment hasn’t changed.

But that stability has a threshold. And the threshold isn’t announced.

What crosses it usually isn’t a catastrophic failure. It’s a moment that reveals a misalignment between what an organisation says it stands for and what it actually does. A restructuring that contradicts a stated commitment. A promotion that makes explicit who’s actually valued. A response to a public controversy that shows what the leadership cares about most. A redundancy round framed as a business necessity that everyone inside knows was preventable. A decision that was individually defensible but that, in the context of everything else, suddenly makes the pattern visible.

The moment it happens, people don’t gradually become less trusting. They recalibrate immediately. And the recalibration is rarely partial. Once the misalignment becomes visible, it reframes everything that came before it. The things that felt like proof of trust now look like evidence of a pattern that was always there. The goodwill that was accumulating reverses.

Not erosion. Collapse.

The cruel part is that the organisations that fall furthest are often the ones that thought they were most secure. High trust numbers create complacency. Leaders stop doing the things that created the trust in the first place because they believe the trust is now structural (built into the organisation) rather than relational, rebuilt constantly through decisions.

The 78% figure is the complacency risk.

The Australian trust picture

The global number sits alongside a specifically Australian pattern worth understanding.

The Edelman data, as reported through the Australian Institute of Company Directors, shows that 73% of Australians demonstrate what the researchers describe as an “insular mindset” on trust: a tendency to extend trust to people and institutions that look like us, sound like us, and share our existing perspectives, while becoming progressively more sceptical of everything outside that circle.

That’s not an observation about individual character. It’s a structural feature of how trust is being rebuilt after years of institutional disruption. I’ve written about this pattern from the north of Australia and across sectors over many years. And it has a specific implication for employers: the trust that organisations currently hold with their workforces isn’t trust in the institution in the abstract. It’s trust in the specific version of the organisation that employees recognise as aligned with their own values and their own lived experience. It’s personal and contextual. It’s particularly fragile when challenged by events that feel like betrayal rather than mismanagement.

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia experienced this in its own way during the recurring app outages of 2024 and 2025. CBA is the most used banking app in Australia. During outage periods, what emerged wasn’t just customer frustration. It was a rapid revival of questions that had seemed settled. Questions about whether a bank that prioritises digital over human contact is really on your side when the technology fails. Questions about what the relationship actually is when you strip away the interface. The app, like the Starbucks app, had been doing work that felt like loyalty. When it failed, what remained was the underlying relationship, which turned out to be thinner than the engagement figures had suggested.

This week’s V/Line disruption illustrated the same pattern in a different register. The trust regional Victorians had in their rail network was, without their knowing it, trust in a stack several layers deep: V/Line’s operations, VicTrack’s infrastructure management, and Telstra’s network timing. The visible layer held the relationship. The invisible layer held the risk. When that layer failed, the visible relationship couldn’t compensate.

That’s the same mechanism inside organisations. When employees say they trust their employer, what they’re trusting is an accumulation of decisions, commitments, and dependencies many of which they can’t fully see. The 78% that shows up in the survey is the visible layer. What it rests on: the consistency of values in decision-making, the integrity of commitments under pressure, the alignment between what the organisation says and what it does when tested. That’s the layer most leaders aren’t examining.

The conditions that make 78% possible (economic stability, consistent management, digital tools that work, a period without significant values-testing decisions) aren’t permanent. They’re a window.

The window

There’s a specific thing about high trust numbers that the Trust Cliffs lens makes visible: they don’t represent a destination. They represent a window.

The window is the period during which an organisation has accumulated more goodwill than it has tested. During that period, leadership has more latitude to make difficult decisions, to change direction, to ask people for patience, than it will have once the window closes. The window isn’t permanent. It’s created through action: specifically through the accumulated experience of people who have been shown, over time, that the organisation’s decisions align with the values it claims.

What closes the window isn’t usually one catastrophic decision. It’s the accumulation of small misalignments: decisions that are individually defensible but collectively signal a drift. And then, eventually, a moment that crystallises that drift into visible misalignment.

The 78% global employer trust figure means many organisations right now have an open window. That’s not proof that things are working. It’s the best possible moment to do the things that keep trust intact. Not because trust is about to fall, but because the window to protect it is open. And windows close, often without warning.

What actually maintains trust

The mistake most organisations make when they read high trust numbers is that they treat them as validation of the current approach. The approach is working, so continue the approach.

What actually maintains trust isn’t consistency with the current approach. It’s a specific kind of decision-making visibility.

I’ve written before about trust as a form of currency: not a static store of value but something that gains or loses worth depending on how it’s spent. The insight that follows from that is that people don’t maintain trust in organisations because the organisation keeps doing what it said it would do. They maintain trust because they can see how decisions are being made and whose interests are being protected in the making of them.

The difference is subtle but critical. An organisation can consistently deliver results and still see trust collapse, because the decisions that produced those results progressively revealed a set of values that people found they didn’t share. Conversely, an organisation can go through significant difficulty (missed targets, lost people, changed direction entirely) and still maintain trust, because through the difficulty the decision-making process remained transparent and the underlying values remained visible.

What I’ve observed across organisations in multiple sectors and countries is that trust peaks, paradoxically, just before the period when it becomes most vulnerable. This is because the behaviours that build trust and the behaviours that test it tend to converge at the same point in an organisation’s trajectory. Growth phases, transformation programs, leadership transitions, restructuring: these are all moments when organisations are doing exactly the things that demonstrate either that their values hold or that they were always situational.

The 78% figure comes at a moment when many organisations are navigating all of these simultaneously. AI transformation. Post-pandemic restructuring. Leadership transitions. Values reckonings that began in 2020 and haven’t fully resolved. The trust that exists now will be tested by decisions in this period in ways it hasn’t been tested before.

Leaders who are reading the 78% as comfort are, in my experience, the ones most likely to be surprised by what comes next.

The ripple effects of organisational trust collapse

Understanding trust as a cliff rather than a slope changes the calculation for what happens if it falls.

The first-order consequence is well understood: people leave. Resignation rates increase, engagement scores drop, productivity falls. These are measurable and they matter. But they’re rarely the most significant consequences.

The second-order consequences arrive more quietly and do more lasting damage. When trust collapses in an organisation, the people who leave first are almost always the people who have options. Which means they’re the people the organisation can least afford to lose. The talent that’s most sought after externally is the most mobile internally. A trust event doesn’t just accelerate departure rates; it disproportionately accelerates the departure of the people whose departure is most consequential.

What remains is a population that either can’t leave or has made a different calculation: that staying, even in a lower-trust environment, is preferable to the uncertainty of leaving. That’s a different workforce from the one that existed before the trust event. It has different characteristics, different motivations, and often a different relationship to risk and to initiative.

The third-order consequence is the one that takes longest to resolve: the culture that rebuilds after a trust cliff isn’t the same culture that existed before it. It’s shaped by the experience of the collapse. It carries a different story about what the organisation is, what it does when tested, what its commitments actually mean. That story is told internally, in the interactions between people who were there and people who arrived after. It’s told externally, in the hiring market and the customer relationship. And it’s very hard to overwrite.

This is why the cost of an organisational trust collapse isn’t well captured in engagement survey metrics or resignation rates. The real cost is in the compounding effect of talent flight, initiative withdrawal, and culture calcification that follows the initial fall. Organisations spend years trying to recover ground they didn’t realise they were about to lose.

The window matters because of what’s on the other side of it if it closes badly.

What to do with an open window

The preparation available when trust is high is qualitatively different from the repair possible after trust has fallen. This is one of the core insights of foresight practice: the most valuable interventions aren’t the ones made in crisis. They’re the ones made when there’s no urgency: when the window is open and the runway is long.

What does that preparation look like in practice?

It starts with reading the data differently. Not “what do our trust numbers tell us about how we’re going?” but “what are the conditions under which this trust was built, and are those conditions stable?” The Edelman data, read this way, becomes more interesting immediately. The 78% employer trust sits alongside values-alignment data that suggests the trust is conditional. The question for leaders isn’t “are people satisfied?” It’s “what would they need to see to change their assessment?”

That’s a harder conversation to have inside an organisation. It’s also significantly more valuable than celebrating the 78%.

The second piece of preparation is decision architecture. Trust is lost not through decisions that turn out to be wrong in retrospect but through decisions that appear to reveal misalignment in the moment. The question to ask, in the preparation window, is: what decisions are coming that might be read that way? And can we make them in a way that makes our values visible, rather than a way that leaves our values ambiguous?

The visibility of values in decision-making is the single most reliable trust maintenance mechanism I’ve observed. Not mission statements. Not all-hands presentations. Not culture surveys. The way a specific decision is made, explained, and followed through: that’s what people file away as evidence of what the organisation actually is. That’s the material of the story that gets told in the third-order aftermath if trust eventually falls.

The third piece is worth naming carefully: building trust that has roots, not just reach.

The Starbucks case, the CBA outage pattern, and this week’s V/Line disruption all point to the same structural vulnerability. Engagement built on convenience is wide but shallow. It reaches far but it doesn’t run deep. The engagement disappears the moment friction arrives: when the app fails, when the train doesn’t come, when the decision forces a values judgment. There’s nothing underneath it to hold when the experience becomes difficult.

The organisations that navigate trust cliffs most successfully are the ones that built depth, not just breadth. Depth comes from relationships that have been tested and held, commitments that have been honoured under difficulty, decisions that revealed values rather than obscured them. That kind of trust is more limited in reach. Not everyone in a large organisation can have a tested relationship with leadership. But it has roots. And when the cliff comes, what survives is what has roots.

Not reach. Roots.

Towards inhabitable trust

The futures I most care about building with organisations are the ones people can actually live inside. Not just survive. Not just manage through. But genuinely inhabit (as employees, as leaders, as the people on whose decisions other people’s working lives depend).

Inhabitable Futures aren’t built by addressing crises. They’re built in the preparation window: in the time between when things look fine and when they’re put to the test. That window is exactly where most organisations currently sit.

Inhabitable trust isn’t a destination any more than 78% is a destination. It’s a condition that has to be recreated through decisions, continuously, over time. The moments that matter most aren’t the moments of high performance. They’re the moments of genuine difficulty, when the values-alignment question becomes concrete rather than theoretical: when the budget is short, when the strategy has to change, when the person who speaks up makes everyone uncomfortable.

Those are the moments that tell people whether they’re inside an organisation they can trust, or inside an organisation that has simply been running conditions that haven’t tested it yet.

The 78% isn’t an ending. It’s a beginning: the conversation that needs to happen before the conditions change.

Organisations that treat this moment as an opportunity will be in a genuinely different position when they face the decisions that test it.

Those that treat it as validation may not see the edge until they’re already falling.

Choose Forward.

Morris Misel is a foresight strategist who works with leaders, organisations, boards, and associations to interpret uncertainty and make better strategic choices. This is part of an ongoing series on how organisations prepare for what’s already arriving.