Fieldnotes

The architecture of trust in business | Fieldnotes by Catalyst

jbaldasare@catalyst.org (Josh Baldasare) — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 19:33:44 GMT

As author Frank Sonnenberg said, “Trust is like blood pressure. It’s silent, vital to good health, and if abused, can be deadly.”

In a destabilizing world full of competing pressures—social grievance, political distrust, economic uncertainty, and rapid AI‑driven change—trust is one of the only scalable advantages business leaders can still control.

In the past two years, global trust has pulled inward: according to the Edelman Trust Institute, people increasingly believe leaders purposely mislead them, and 70% say they hesitate to trust those with different values or information sources, retreating into closed circles at work and at home.

In this environment, leaders won’t regain commitment with empty slogans or perks. They will do it by making decisions that are predictable, fair, and visibly aligned with people’s interests.

That’s what Sandra Sucher, professor of management practice at Harvard Business School, argues leaders must do now. Sucher has spent her career, including twelve years at Fidelity Investments as Chief Quality Officer, studying trust not as a soft sentiment, but as a measurable, behavioral system that leaders can deliberately build or quickly destroy.

The skill shortage no one is talking about | Fieldnotes by Catalyst

Zach Mercurio — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 19:32:08 GMT

There’s seemingly endless commentary about talent shortages, technical upskilling, and preparing workers for an “AI-driven” future. But the skills that will most impact the future viability of organizations aren’t technical. They’re human skills—and we’re losing them.

Gallup’s 2025 employee engagement data showed dismal results. Just 3 in 10 people are emotionally invested in their work, the lowest rate in a decade. This is despite billions invested in the employee experience, countless rollouts of well-being and inclusion programs, and a surge in perks and recognition initiatives.

But if you look deeper into the Gallup data, you’ll spot the driver of persistent disengagement: just 39% of employees say that someone at work cares for them as a person, down from 47% five years ago. That data punctuates a series of reports over the last five years showing that 30% of workers feel invisible or “flat-out ignored,” only 46% feel valued, and close to half say they feel lonely at work.

The science of building teams | Fieldnotes by Catalyst

thagiwara@catalyst.org (Tuesday Hagiwara) — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 19:30:48 GMT

In 2002, the Oakland A’s had one of the smallest budgets in baseball. They couldn’t afford the superstar players, so they built a team optimized for other, undervalued performance metrics. ‘Old school’ baseball leaders laughed, but that strategy allowed the A’s to go to the playoffs, while bigger budget teams sat on the bench.

Twenty years later, companies are making the same mistake as ‘old school’ baseball. Despite the deep investments in talent, a global study from Dale Carnegie reported only 30% of workplace teams are high-performing.

The problem isn’t a lack of intelligence. It’s in how we design teams.

Anita Woolley, a leading authority in team performance, says we’re optimizing for the wrong variable. A growing body of research shows that high collective intelligence is a stronger predictor of a team’s effectiveness than individual IQ scores.

Collective intelligence, a term Woolley helped coin, refers to how well a group of people can effectively solve a variety of problems. Not because they’re smarter, but because they can integrate what they know differently. This also allows them to learn and adapt more quickly, a crucial skill in a volatile business landscape.

“The rate of change and complexity of today’s problems demands this approach,” says Woolley, the professor of organizational behavior and associate dean of research at Carnegie Mellon University.

“More and more, problems require multiple experts to integrate what they know collectively in order to come up with a good solution—an innovative solution—because nobody can know all the different domains that are relevant to most problems. Because of that, innovation has increasingly become a social process.”

Improv skills to shift your mindset | Fieldnotes by Catalyst

jbaldasare@catalyst.org (Josh Baldasare) — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 19:29:41 GMT

At first glance, improv seems an unlikely model for leadership. Popular culture like Whose Line Is It Anyway? portrays it as chaotic, unserious, and dependent on natural charisma. But in practice, improv is governed by a small set of disciplined rules that enable groups to operate effectively without scripts, hierarchy, or certainty.

These rules challenge an assumption many of us carry: That we need to have the best idea and defend it. Improv teaches us that the biggest ideas often start small and are built collaboratively and incrementally.

Jacob Goldstein, founder and executive director of The Leadership Laboratory, is a leadership educator with a background in the arts who has spent years translating these rules into a practical leadership framework for organizations. Here are four improv principles that translate to better leadership behaviors that can be designed, practiced, and reinforced.

Miscalibrated trust is AI's hidden risk | Fieldnotes by Catalyst

thagiwara@catalyst.org (Tuesday Hagiwara) — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 19:28:17 GMT

When personal computers launched, designers created a desktop interface. Why?

Gale Lucas, a leading voice in human-centered computing and research associate professor at the University of Southern California, says it’s because the tangible interface allowed users to think of it as a tool.

Without it, users tended to think it was flawless or magical.

Now, we’re making the same mistake with AI.

Poor data, unclear problem statements, and data silos aren’t the only challenges plaguing enterprise AI.

The greater, hidden risk is: miscalibrated trust – when users place either too much or too little confidence in systems whose limits they do not understand.

This miscalibrated trust is costing organizations their strategic advantage.

According to MIT Media Lab, 95% of generative AI pilots fail and the hope for agentic initiatives isn’t that much brighter. Gartner predicts that over 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027.

Creating humanity‑centered systems | Fieldnotes by Catalyst

thagiwara@catalyst.org (Tuesday Hagiwara) — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 19:26:59 GMT

In 1979, after the infamous Three Mile Island nuclear accident, researcher and author Don Norman was brought in to answer a seemingly simple question: Why had the plant operators made such “stupid” mistakes?

He found the opposite. The operators were highly skilled; the system was flawed. The control room was packed with 4,000 nearly identical switches, competing alarms, cryptic indicators, and poor feedback loops.

“If you wanted to design something to cause errors,” Norman recalls, “you couldn’t have done a better job.”

This insight formed the basis of his philosophy of human‑centered design, a framework for how to design products, systems, and services made popular around the world by his many books, especially The Design of Everyday Things.

But today, Norman champions a more expansive approach. Where human-centered design focuses on users, humanity-centered design focuses on systems—asking us to consider the long-term impact every decision makes on the overall ecosystems we exist within.

In an era where products and services are optimized for speed, not stewardship, this philosophy offers a blueprint for how organizations can build solutions that consider the entire human experience across every stage of development, from raw material to real-world use.

Designing trust into where we work | Fieldnotes by Catalyst

jbaldasare@catalyst.org (Josh Baldasare) — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 19:24:19 GMT

(Above) Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, known informally as Schiphol, is the main international airport of the Netherlands. Photo credit: thonik

When you think about trust, you probably don't picture an airport. Especially not a busy international hub like Schiphol in Amsterdam.

Picture it: you just stepped off your plane after a long flight. Your body is disoriented from the jet lag and your mind is foggy from lack of sleep. It’s loud, crowded, and full of signs competing for your attention. You can’t immediately place where you are, and you’re worried you won’t make it in time for your connection.

In this moment, you need orientation. Something to signal, without words, that you’re in the right place.

This is the starting point for Dutch design studio thonik, whose design identity work for Schiphol helps millions of travelers every year feel more at ease in one of the world’s busiest airports. Their premise is simple—trust is something you feel long before you can articulate it.

Environmental neuroscience reinforces this idea: the built environment continually interacts with the brain, influencing attention, stress responses, and emotional regulation in ways we often feel before we understand.

Trust, in other words, is not abstract. It begins in the body and is built through the signals that shape how people move, feel, and belong.

This raises an important question for business leaders: What would it look like to design the places where we work (and all our systems) to create trust?

Cave diving and leadership | Fieldnotes by Catalyst

thagiwara@catalyst.org (Tuesday Hagiwara) — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 19:21:20 GMT

(Above) Exploring the largest iceberg in recorded history in Antarctica. Photo credit: Jill Heinerth

There are no second chances in deep sea cave diving. In the darkness, divers must navigate tight spaces, with no direct access to the surface. Their survival depends on mental discipline, adherence to strict protocols, and extraordinary trust.

No one knows this better than Jill Heinerth, one of the world’s most accomplished underwater explorers. A pioneer in her field, she shared three lessons that can help business leaders today, who are operating under their own extreme environments: navigating new frontiers in AI, battling employee cognitive overload, and heightened stakeholder pressure.

Nine actions that create trust | Fieldnotes by Catalyst

jbaldasare@catalyst.org (Josh Baldasare) — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 19:19:17 GMT

(Above) Award winners onstage at the 2025 Catalyst Honours conference in Toronto.

Leadership behaviors that scale systemic change

When extended intentionally, trust doesn’t stop with the person who receives it. It moves across teams, geographies, power structures, and customer experiences: it becomes a system.

Each year, Catalyst awards inspirational business Champions who make inclusion a successful business practice. Across the nine Canadians we recognized in 2025, a clear pattern emerges: trust is transitive.

Leaders who can activate and circulate trust through their companies are the ones capable of creating winning cultures that endure (and win awards). When we asked the 2025 Champions how this was possible, they broke it down for us into nine interconnected actions.

Letter from the editors | Fieldnotes by Catalyst

Tuesday Hagiwara & Josh Baldasare — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 19:06:03 GMT

When we set out to create Fieldnotes, we knew the macro forces reshaping our industries, workforces, and workplaces were putting demands on leaders like never before. To tackle today’s business challenges, we all need to think differently.

The name Fieldnotes was born from our desire to seek illuminating insights beyond the traditional business or inclusion canon. In research, fieldnotes capture the observations of individuals who are immersing themselves in new environments. These notes contain the details others often overlook, enabling them to discover new patterns and make breakthrough connections.

And that’s exactly what we set out to do.

Fieldnotes invites you to look at the challenges your business is facing from a new vantage point. For example, journey with us to observe howdeep-sea cave divers lead in high pressure environments, howimprovisational theatre concepts can accelerate innovation, and how we candesign workspaces to create psychological safety.

Our inaugural issue investigates the question: What if trust became the new measure of organizational success?

The idea for this first theme was sparked by author and researcher Zach Mercurio. As we talked about the newly accepted reality that we’re entering the age of AI, he offered a reframing that stopped us short: “No,” he said. “I think we’re re‑entering the age of human trust.”

With those words lingering, we set out to examine why this moment demands a renewed focus on trust—why it’s under strain, where it’s breaking down, and what it will take for businesses to rebuild it with intention.

This issue is the result of master classes from the likes of trust expertSandra Sucher, who helped us map the architecture of trust within organizations today; computer science researcher Gale Lucas, who unpacked the importance of calibrating our trust in AI; organizational scientistAnita Woolley, who taught us how to unlock the power of collective intelligence in teams; and authorDon Norman, who illuminated the benefits of designing for humanity, not just for humans.

Across these stories, a throughline emerged:

Trust is not a sentiment—it is a performance system. It drives productivity, retention, and transformation.

Catalyst’s 60+ years of research demonstrate the power of inclusion to create trust within the workplace. And when those levers of inclusion are applied intentionally, they become a company's competitive advantage.

Our hope is that Fieldnotes illuminates your path forward in enabling trust throughout your organization.

Thank you for joining us on this journey.

With gratitude,

Tuesday Hagiwara & Josh Smalley Baldasare