Five to One

Trust takes months to build. One lie kills it instantly.

Not symmetrical. Not fair. But that's the math.

Gottman studied marriages. Found a pattern.

Healthy marriages have a 5:1 ratio. Five positive interactions for every negative one. Below that ratio, divorce becomes likely.

Organizations work the same way.

Your team spent six months building trust. Daily standups. Vulnerability exercises. Psychological safety training.

Trust scores going up. Coordination improving.

Then one manager punishes someone for speaking up. We say "you can have speed or quality, pick one."

What we mean is "our trust is so low that politics eat all our capacity."

We say "moving fast means breaking things."

What we mean is "we can't coordinate, so speed creates chaos."

We say "excellence requires process and oversight."

What we mean is "we don't trust people to make good decisions, so we control every decision."

The trade-off isn't between speed and excellence. It's between trust and friction.

High-friction systems force the choice. Every decision needs approval. Every approval needs a meeting. Every meeting needs prep.

The overhead consumes the capacity.

You can go fast and break things, or go slow and maybe not break things. Both options are bad.

High-trust systems eliminate the trade-off. Decisions happen where the information is. Mistakes get caught and fixed fast. Speed and quality both improve.

This is the Loop, Not Line principle. The spiral goes both ways.

The trade-off is real. But it's not the trade-off you think it is. The Momentum Engine shows where friction hides. The trust doesn't just decrease. It reverses.

People update their priors immediately. "Oh, that safety thing? That was performance. This is real."

The cascade goes backward fast.

You need five trust-building moments to recover from one trust-destroying moment. Most organizations try to recover with one apology. The math says that's insufficient.

This is why "one bad apple" destroys culture. Not because one person is bad. Because destroying trust is much easier than building it.

This connects to Trust Collapses Faster - ten years of culture erased in one decision.

Watch your ratios. Five to one. Always. The Momentum Engine shows how to protect the ratio.