Learning to navigate together

There’s a lot of conversation in my professional circles about Australians’ declining trust in institutions.

Trust is falling in governments, media, experts, corporations and international organisations. The degree varies depending on the data you reference, but the pattern is fairly consistent.

The cause is usually attributed to poor leadership, misinformation, social media amplification, political dysfunction and the general sense that life is getting harder.

Those things undoubtedly play a part. But that explanation has never felt quite enough to me.

I’ve found myself wondering whether something deeper is happening. Something more human.

What if we’re not losing trust only because institutions are failing?

What if we’re also losing trust because we’re seeing the complexity of the world more clearly than we once did?

For much of modern history, particularly in relatively stable Western democracies, many of us lived with an implicit belief that institutions had a high degree of control over society.

• Governments managed economies.

• Borders contained problems.

• Experts understood the world.

• Leaders could steer outcomes.

• Crises felt bounded and manageable.

Of course, that sense of institutional reliability was never equally available to everyone. For many people, institutions have always been experienced as unreliable, absent or actively harmful. But there was still a broadly shared story that someone, somewhere, was steering the ship.

Today, the limits of that story are becoming harder to ignore.

In the past few years, we’ve seen how a pandemic beginning overseas can close local businesses. How a war on the other side of the world can change supermarket prices at home. How algorithms designed in Silicon Valley can shape community cohesion in regional Australia. Climate events ignore political boundaries. Financial systems react faster than governments can legislate. Decisions made in one part of the world ripple rapidly through the lives of people somewhere else.

The systems shaping our lives are global, interconnected and difficult for any one institution to control. And I wonder whether we’re beginning to sense that - not necessarily in an intellectual way, but emotionally.

Are we starting to feel that the world is less anchored than it once was? That perhaps the institutions we trusted are no longer steering the ship?

Or maybe they never were.

This is psychologically discombobulating for the average punter because humans aren’t particularly comfortable with uncertainty.

We like visible cause and effect. We like stability. We like to believe someone competent is in charge.

When the world feels unpredictable or untethered, we search for certainty wherever we can find it.

Sometimes that search takes us toward stronger local communities, mutual support, deeper relationships and renewed civic participation. Local action gives us something tangible. It allows us to see where our contribution matters and to recover some sense of agency.

But sometimes the search for certainty looks more like retreat. Retreat into rigid ideologies or hyper-individualism. Retreat into nostalgia or conspiracy theories. Retreat into online and offline tribes offering simple explanations for complex problems.

Uncertainty is exhausting. A coherent story - no matter how flawed - can feel emotionally safer than a complicated reality.

Complexity rarely offers that kind of comfort. It’s messy and difficult to wrap your head around. Our instinct is to grasp tightly to something that makes sense. Something that offers solace, explanation or a small feeling of control.

Even better if other people are holding onto the same thing. There’s solidarity in togetherness.

This is where I think the current moment presents an opportunity for community life. When our trust in the institutions above us becomes less certain, the relationships around us begin to matter differently.

If institutions alone can’t provide certainty in a deeply interconnected world, resilience may increasingly depend on our capacity to respond together.

Local trust.

Social cohesion.

Relationships that can hold disagreement and uncertainty. Communities capable of learning and adapting.

Citizens with a genuine sense of agency and shared responsibility, rather than the feeling that they must wait for institutions to solve everything on their behalf.

That doesn’t make institutions irrelevant. Effective and trustworthy institutions remain essential. But perhaps their role is changing. Maybe the future isn’t about powerful institutions delivering certainty to passive citizens. Perhaps it’s about institutions helping communities develop the relationships, knowledge and agency to navigate uncertainty together.

This would represent a different relationship between institutions and citizens: less dependent on command and control, and more capable of sharing responsibility without abandoning institutional accountability.

I think we may already be seeing the early signs of that shift.

There are growing conversations about participation rather than prescription. About institutions acting not only as decision-makers, but as convenors, facilitators and partners in community life.

Community foundations are exploring systems change. Governments are experimenting with deliberative processes. Universities and other institutions are placing greater emphasis on co-design and lived experience. Local communities are building networks of belonging and resilience. Organisations are recognising that technical solutions alone can’t solve problems that are fundamentally relational.

These approaches are often messy, slower and less linear than the models many of us grew up with. They require listening, shared ownership, adaptation, patience and a tolerance for discomfort.

But perhaps that’s the point.

Interconnected societies can’t be held together through certainty and control alone. They need relationships strong enough to hold uncertainty, communities capable of learning together, and institutions willing to share power as well as exercise it.

Perhaps resilience in an interconnected world doesn’t come from recovering the illusion that someone is fully in control. Perhaps it comes from developing the relationships, agency and shared capacity to respond when no one is.

I don’t think we fully know what that future looks like yet.

But I suspect the conversations emerging in communities, institutions and civic life are signs that we’re trying to find our way there.

The work ahead may be less about finding someone to steer the ship for us, and more about learning how to navigate complexity together.