Why do people avoid a process, even if it looks like it should work?
Governance structures can look good on paper. Clear processes, defined roles, and clear lines of authority all contribute to good structure. But even when everything looks clean on the outside, it can still be overlooked or bypassed by the people it was meant to serve.
The real issue sits in the design, not in the people running it. Trust-building is what determines whether a structure gets used, yet it’s rarely factored into the structure itself. It lives silently in the background as an unspoken language, something everyone in the room can feel but nobody wrote into the plan. Without it, structures fall apart from the inside. The design remains clear, but the trust in it vanishes.
“Well-designed” usually means a plan: words on paper, timelines that keep people accountable, and roles that are clear enough that nobody is left guessing who owns a decision. These mechanics can keep the structure standing, but they are not enough to make it trusted. A plan can check every one of those boxes and still fail the moment it meets real people with real doubts. We can lean on good design only so far. Trust needs a place in the plan from the start; it’s not something that can be added as an afterthought once it’s already in motion.
Picture a made-up example. A committee is working through a multi-phase community plan. Officially, there’s a timeline: review, draft, and then final sign-off, with each phase having a clear start and end date. The project kicks off, but early on, a few committee members start feeling like the pace isn’t leaving enough room to consider if people are ready to move to the next phase. Not all voices feel heard. Instead of raising it in the meeting, side conversations start happening among committee members and with the wider community, outside of the official process. The formal plan keeps moving on paper, but the real decisions are being made somewhere else, a bit like the curtain in The Wizard of Oz: official-looking and front-and-centre, while the real work happens behind it.
This happens because structures often get built around funder timelines or textbook logic, instead of the rhythm people need to trust a decision. A schedule built for a grant cycle and one built for consensus are rarely the same length. Treating them as interchangeable is where a lot of this starts. Many Indigenous governance systems build decisions around consensus and relationships, not just hierarchy, and that isn’t something you can rush. A structure built around that logic doesn’t fall apart; it just needs room to move at a different pace.
What’s missing in most conventional structures is something called conflict capacity: the structural ability in a system to hold disagreement or friction without people quietly routing around it. Disagreement is natural. It should be a welcomed, visible part of the process, not something people carry silently because there was never room made for it.
This is different from conflict transformation, which is what happens once disagreement has already surfaced. Conflict capacity is about whether the structure lets it surface naturally in the first place.
In practice, this looks like deliberately scheduled check-ins built into the timeline from the start, well before anything has gone wrong. These are real, necessary points in the process where the plan pauses to look at the bigger picture and adjust based on whether people are ready to move forward. It also means giving those check-ins real authority to change a date, not just logging a concern for later. A mid-project request for more time is a signal; the check-ins are catching exactly what they were built to catch.
Trust is structural, not optional. It’s either built into a design, or it isn’t. That’s a solvable problem, not a flaw in the plan from the start. Structures built this way hold up when it matters: when someone in the room isn’t sure yet, and the system has room for that.