Editor’s note, September 2026: This paper has been revised since it was first published. The organization it described has become Spark of Trust, and the first stage of the community it proposes is now underway in public, as a weekly podcast and newsletter, in place of the inaugural convening the paper first called for. The paper has been reworked from seven parts to five and now clearly states which of its claims are being tested and which remain unproven. The argument — that trust is rebuilt by a catalytic community, grown at the speed of trust — is unchanged.
“In our era of political polarization, ‘fake news,’ and tribal politics, trust in the media, government officials, and even science is fading. This can be catastrophic if an influenza or another type of pandemic arises. Under such circumstances, the public’s failure to trust the guidance offered by public health officials may well make a bad situation worse.”
— Wendy E. Parmet and Mark A. Rothstein, 20181
During the COVID-19 pandemic, trust — or rather, its erosion — made all the difference between an effective collective response and public confusion. The failure ran in both directions. The institutions charged with the response asked for more trust than they had earned. They stated as settled what they did not yet know, treated contested policy as science, and suppressed questions they did not want asked; when the gaps showed, their credibility was spent. A public that had watched this happen stopped listening, and some of it stopped listening to everything, including the guidance that would have helped. Trust, once lost, could not be regained by either side. The pandemic showed how quickly a society fractures when that reserve of goodwill and trust is gone. Our earlier analysis in The Trust Apocalypse: How We Lost Faith in What Is True, Our Institutions and Each Other described how this crisis, decades in the making, threatens societal cohesion and democracy itself. We see warning signs in the rise of factionalism, public health responses hampered by suspicion, and citizens doubting the legitimacy of elections and scientific facts. Without trust, cooperation gets harder at every scale: governance, public health, the ordinary business of living alongside people you disagree with.
Reversing this trend requires more than isolated solutions; it necessitates interconnected strategies to transform our information ecosystem, reinvent institutions for the digital age, and rebuild trust between people. The trust apocalypse is a quintessential wicked problem — complex, systemic, and defying any single solution. No lone government policy, tech innovation, or charismatic leader can restore trust at scale.
Recognizing the limitations of traditional hierarchical models and isolated interventions, we previously introduced the concept of a “catalytic community” — a living network that continuously learns, collaborates, and takes collective action toward systemic change. In practice, such networks evolve through stages: from initial connection and relationship-building to co-creating shared goals and strategies, and then into sustained, widespread collective action for impact. At that mature stage, the network itself becomes catalytic — it can self-organize responses to emerging problems and drive change on multiple fronts simultaneously. A catalytic community is greater than the sum of its parts: it actively aligns the talents and resources of independent players toward a common mission (here, restoring trust). It creates the conditions for new initiatives to emerge and grow quickly. It is a purpose-driven network of networks that connects people, ignites collaboration, and catalyzes systemic change.
Drawing on insights from leaders such as General Stanley McChrystal and network theorists like David Ehrlichman, we outline how a catalytic community forms and what it would take for one to produce systemic change. Our goal here is practical. Building on our earlier conclusion — that there is “no silver bullet to restore widespread trust” — this is an account of how Spark of Trust is approaching it, and of what we do not yet know.
What is a Catalytic Community?
A catalytic community is a self-organizing, purpose-driven network of networks that collectively generate sustained societal change through trust-based relationships, decentralized coordination, and coherent action.
The approach is grounded in real-world insights from leaders and network practitioners across sectors. Retired General Stanley McChrystal learned in Iraq after 2003 that traditional hierarchies fail against fast-moving, networked threats. In Iraq, he found that to dismantle a decentralized insurgent network, his forces “would have to become a team of teams, faster, flatter and more flexible than ever.” This meant breaking down silos and empowering small teams to trust one another and act autonomously. As McChrystal writes in Team of Teams2, success depended on “trust, shared consciousness, and empowered execution” rather than top-down control. A culture of familiarity and trust had to replace rigid command, so JSOC’s (Joint Special Operations Command) thousands of personnel began sharing information during daily cross-team briefings, building a “shared consciousness” of the battle in real time. This sharing dramatically increased agility: frontline officers gained “the confidence to solve their own similar problems without the need for further guidance,” instead of waiting for orders. The military’s “team of teams” experience showed that trusted networks can outpace and outperform centralized organizations in complex environments. We apply the same principle: to confront society’s widespread breakdown of trust, we must forge a network of teams (across sectors and communities) that share information openly and act in a coordinated but decentralized way.
Business and social innovators echo this approach. David Ehrlichman, in Impact Networks: Create Connection, Spark Collaboration, and Catalyze Systemic Change3, distills the five key practices for effective collaborative networks:
Clarify purpose;
Convene the right people;
Cultivate trust;
Coordinate actions;
Collaborate generously.
Notably, “trust, not control” is the first guiding principle — no single authority can command a network, so trust and mutual commitment are the glue. Impact networks distribute leadership and information flow so that each member (node) can connect and contribute directly. This decentralization makes the whole more resilient and creative by leveraging each member’s strengths rather than funneling everything through a single hub. Ehrlichman also emphasizes the importance of continuous communication and learning — regular convenings, shared dashboards, and transparent updates — to maintain alignment and build collective intelligence. Impact networks aim for coordinated action: members synchronize their initiatives or pool resources toward a shared goal while maintaining the autonomy to adapt quickly as conditions change. All these traits — trust-based relationships, distributed structure, open communication, and adaptive coordination — are design pillars of a catalytic community. They enable a loose collection of individuals to evolve into a high-functioning, catalytic community over time.
A third insight comes from the practice of convening itself: how we bring people together matters. The formats that reliably produce candor among leaders are small, off-the-record, and unstaged — no speeches and no panels. To solve complex problems, we need protocols that encourage honest dialogue and relationship-building rather than stage-managed conferences, and we carry that principle into the interview format described below.
In short, catalytic communities are about trust, empowerment, and the ability to act together. They draw on principles proven in military leadership, social impact networks, and the practice of convening alike: push decision-making to the edges, replace control with trust and mutual accountability, and create environments where diverse actors can learn and act together. Our goal is to build such a community as the answer to the trust apocalypse — a “Team of Teams” for society that can respond to challenges with the agility of a network and the unity of a shared purpose. The following sections outline how this community forms, what it will need as it grows, and how it could fail, serving as both an argument and an honest account of where that work stands.
What Transfers, and What Does Not
The analogy to a team of teams is useful and imperfect. McChrystal’s task force became a network to fight another network: an adversary with a shape, one that could be found, mapped, and hit, and against which a hierarchy was losing. The trust apocalypse has no such shape. Nobody is on the other side to out-organize. What our earlier paper described is a condition, produced over sixty years by forces — suburbs and screens, captured institutions, an attention economy that rewards contempt — that a network cannot target, because they are not targets. The mechanism transfers; the opponent does not.
The conditions do not transfer either. By his own account, McChrystal began as the hub. He set the conditions for the network, and it only worked once he gave up the command that had been the norm and let the network share what it knew and act on it. But he had command to build with. He could mandate the daily briefing, order embeds, fund teams, and remove people, and everyone in the room shared an enemy and a clearance. A convener in an open society has to make the same handoff from hub to network without any of those tools. What replaces them is what this paper is mostly about: a purpose people chose rather than were assigned; transparency where there is no command; the freedom to leave where there is no discipline. These are weaker than orders. They are also the only instruments a free society allows, and the only ones that build the kind of trust worth having.
So the claim we are making has three links, and we argue only the first here. First, that a network of the people already rebuilding trust can be formed — that they can be made visible to one another, given a shared language and purpose, and connected in ways that do not run through us. This paper argues that, and the podcast and newsletter are its test. Second, that such a network, once it exists, produces work that would not have happened otherwise: collaborations, experiments, institutions. That is what Stage 2 is for, and we will not claim it before it happens. Third, that work of that kind moves trust in society — not by reversing sixty years of structural force, which no network can do, but by making the repairs visible, connected, and copyable, so that the many small restorations already under way add up to something a country can notice. That is what Stage 3 is for, and it is the link furthest from proven. A reader who has watched a dozen initiatives promise to fix trust is entitled to know which promises this one is making. It is making the first, testing it in public, and holding the other two until the first has been earned.
Up Next — Part II: The People Already at Work, and the Three Stages
Wendy E. Parmet and Mark A. Rothstein, “The 1918 Influenza Pandemic: Lessons Learned and Not—Introduction to the Special Section,” American Journal of Public Health 108, no. 11 (November 2018): 1435, https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2018.304695.
Stanley McChrystal et al., Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World (Portfolio, 2015).
David Ehrlichman, Impact Networks: Create Connection, Spark Collaboration, and Catalyze Systemic Change (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2021).