The Invisible Condition Your Strategy Depends On
Perspective as an adjunct professor teaching strategic management, the art of decision making course inside the Design MBA program at California College of the Arts.
A reflection inspired by Jen Randle’s, co-founder of SGNL, recent guest lecture on “Trust as Strategy” .
The classic view of strategy is positional: where do we compete, how do we win. A more sophisticated view, especially in complex, rapidly changing environments, is that strategy is about creating and maintaining the conditions under which good decisions can be made and sustained over time.
That shifts the question from 'what is our plan?' to 'what must be true for our strategy to hold?'
A critical condition is trust.
Trust literacy is the language Jen Randle brought into sharp focus during her guest lecture. Jen is the founder of SGNL and one of the clearest systems thinkers working at the intersection of trust, culture, and strategy. Her thesis is precise: → Strategy stalls without trust. → Culture fractures without trust. → Capital erodes without trust.
Within a couple of hours, she left the cohort equipped with a language. Here are the key takeaways.
Trust is infrastructure. A structural operating condition. When it's absent, even well-designed strategies collapse from the inside.
Trust operates at three levels simultaneously: self, organizational, and institutional. You cannot scale trust outward until it's stable inward.
The six conditions of trust are diagnostic. Proximity — Are we actually close to reality? Care — Who is this really for? Participation — Do people have a voice that matters? Stewardship — Are we building for the long term or extracting short-term gains? Accountability — Do we own impact? Repair — Do we actually fix what breaks?
The relationship between trust and the condition of proximity resonated strongly. As someone who has worked in innovation delivery, proximity has to be designed in, not aspired toward. It shows up in how I make staffing decisions, who's in the room, what research is considered legitimate, including whether frontline sales and customer knowledge is actually heard or quietly discounted, how close the feedback loop is between the people experiencing strategy and the people delivering it, and visibility into its impact.
My students graduating with their MBA in a few weeks are about to step into companies and institutions they didn't design. What Jen gave them was the ability to see clearly where trust is holding and where it's quietly breaking down before anyone names it.
When trust compounds, so does enterprise value.