Adam Blackheart, Assistant Director of Procurement at Department of Communities WA, explores the velocity of trust and why it’s really about coherence.
Trust as organisational physics – coherence as the true currency.
Imagine dropping a marble into honey. That’s how most decisions move through an organisation. The marble isn’t slow; the substance is thick.
We call it governance, assurance or oversight – but what it really measures is viscosity. The denser the fear, the slower the flow.
And every so often, something cuts through – a leader delegates, a team decides – and suddenly the marble races, proof that trust reduces drag better than any process ever written.
That’s the velocity we keep trying to design into systems – and the one we keep designing out.
Trust as physics
We tend to talk about trust as an emotion – soft, human, unquantifiable – but in practice, it behaves like physics.
It has mass – credibility. It has momentum – the willingness to move without fear. And it has friction – that invisible drag created when systems no longer believe in themselves.
A Harvard Business Review study found that employees in high-trust organisations report 50 percent higher productivity and 40 percent less burnout.
Meanwhile, McKinsey’s research on organisational speed showed that empowered teams make decisions up to twice as fast as peers buried in approval layers.
I’m sure trust isn’t a sentiment. Instead, it’s throughput.
Australian realities
Closer to home, the OECD’s 2025 Drivers of Trust in Public Institutions in Australia report describes a paradox: Australians trust their public services more than many nations – around 61 percent, according to the APSC’s 2025 Trust Report – yet within agencies, only about a third of senior leaders express high confidence in their peers to make independent calls without escalation.
The result? Organisations that look calm from the outside but move at the speed of internal permission.
Every procurement team knows this gravity by heart:
- The RFX delayed because Legal needs another look
- The project paused for the third time awaiting executive endorsement
- The pilot that never scaled because no one wanted to risk the post-implementation review
Control expands, but confidence shrinks.
The cost of slow trust
The hidden cost of slow trust isn’t just time – it’s heat loss. Momentum dissipates. Ideas cool. Teams learn that initiative is punished faster than inaction.
We measure compliance metrics, project milestones and delivery timeframes, but almost no one measures trust velocity. How long does it take for a decision to move from desk to action? How many approvals stand between insight and outcome? How many “For Your Information” emails does it take to prove good faith?
The answers tell you more about culture than any engagement survey.
Friction points
Every system has friction points – those tiny resistances that slow flow. Some are structural: legacy policies, risk appetites frozen in amber, frameworks that can’t distinguish between governance and bureaucracy. Others are behavioural: leaders who mistake control for clarity, staff who withhold initiative because permission feels safer.
And some are psychological: the cultural hangover of “don’t be the one who gets it wrong.”
Together, they turn trust into molasses.
The paradox of transparency
Ironically, the more we try to make processes transparent, the less we seem to trust them.
Dashboards, reports, committees – all designed to create comfort. Yet as McKinsey noted in its 2024 study on decision speed, “organisations chasing certainty often sacrifice agility.”
Transparency is necessary, but when every decision must be seen by everyone, oversight becomes theatre. The healthiest organisations don’t hide information – they simply know when to stop broadcasting it.
The culture of permission
In high-trust systems, permission is implicit: people act within boundaries because the boundaries are understood. In low-trust ones, permission must be explicit: sought, granted and documented before anything happens.
The difference is speed.
An empowered contract manager can approve a $20,000 variation before lunch. A fearful one books three meetings, drafts two risk memos and loses six days.
That delay isn’t inefficiency. It’s culture, expressed in time.
The physics of betrayal
Nothing slows a system faster than suspicion. Not the healthy kind – the kind that checks and balances – but the artificial kind, manufactured to look like vigilance.
It starts with whispers: an internal review, a confidential inquiry, an independent assessment of process integrity. The words sound noble – bureaucratically antiseptic – but everyone knows the subtext; someone in the fancy offices no longer trusts the teams doing the heavy lifting.
Procurement almost always feels it first, because procurement is where intent meets evidence and where evidence can be made to look guilty by design.
Don’t get me wrong, procurement teams and leaders must be regularly looked at, after all we are at the coal face of how agencies spend tax payers’ money, but that’s not what I’m talking about.
I’m talking about trust as performance.
Suddenly, decisions are not delayed by risk but by theatre. Files are pulled for “quality assurance.” Emails are re-read for tone. Colleagues stop speaking freely because every sentence now feels like potential Exhibit A.
What’s lost isn’t just speed. It’s coherence. Trust, once fractured, changes the gravity of an organisation. Work becomes heavier, communication thickens and every approval drags through invisible doubt.
Leadership calls it due diligence. Staff call it betrayal dressed in policy language.
Tone-deaf decisions – especially those made in secret – do more than erode confidence. They recalibrate the moral physics of a place. The people closest to the work learn a quiet lesson: truth is less important than optics and integrity is something you perform, not live.
And here lies the paradox – investigations meant just to protect reputation often destroy it. You can’t audit your way back to trust. You can only rebuild it by remembering that confidence is reciprocal.
It is my belief that when leaders act without listening, the system responds like any other body under strain: it seizes. Momentum turns to memory. People stop believing, not because they were wronged, but because they were unseen.
Trust doesn’t die in conflict. It dies in silence – in the hollow between decision and dialogue.
The human algorithm
All systems run on algorithms – ours just happen to be biological. When a leader asks for input but never uses it, trust decays logarithmically. When a team sees its initiative rewarded, trust compounds.
We understand this instinctively. It’s why the best leaders communicate early, explain clearly and admit uncertainty. Because the moment someone says, “I don’t know, but I’ll find out,” velocity increases. Honesty is the most efficient workflow there is.
A Haiku for the operational engineers
Speed is not the goal
It’s the symptom of belief
Measured in silence
How to increase velocity (without breaking things)
The most trusted organisations don’t move fast despite governance; they move fast because governance makes sense.
1. Delegate decisively. Authority isn’t symbolic; it’s operational. If you don’t trust your people to decide, you’re not managing risk – you’re multiplying it.
2. Measure decision latency. How long does it take to move from idea to implementation? If a $50,000 procurement takes longer to approve than to deliver, that’s not oversight – that’s entropy.
3. Link every rule to intent. If a policy can’t answer “what behaviour is this protecting?”, it probably isn’t.
4. Verify lightly. Trust then check – but don’t let checking become the work.
5. Reward alignment, not compliance. Because alignment sustains trust. Compliance only sustains evidence.
Coherence as currency
Velocity of trust is really about coherence – the alignment between what we say, what we measure and what we actually reward.
If you incentivise caution, you’ll get perfection without progress. If you incentivise compliance, you’ll get adherence without imagination. If you incentivise trust, you’ll get motion – purposeful, graceful, fast enough to matter.
And that, perhaps, is the test. An organisation doesn’t need to move faster than everyone else. It just needs to move faster than its own bureaucracy.
The closing cadence
Trust isn’t a virtue. It’s an equation. Not a word in the annual report, but a measure of organisational physics – the force that converts shared purpose into collective motion.
It’s built in whispers, lost in policy and rediscovered in every brave “yes.”
So this week, look around. At your team. Your process. Your inbox. Ask one question:
What would move faster if I trusted sooner?
That, colleagues, is the true velocity test we all face.
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