In a significant twist, the launch team at Olsztyn identified “trust” as the keyword for its experiments. As plant manager Jaroslaw Michalak explained:

We used to operate with the implicit assumption that operators weren’t trustworthy, and that trust must be earned. We now start by completely trusting everyone, and it’s up to the individual to lose trust based on his or her actions. It sounds like a trivial shift in perspective, but it’s had a big impact. When we consider changes to our practices now, the burden of proof is on the side of those who want to keep control.

It’s not just technology that has improved people’s lives; moral change has done so, too. In 1700, women were unable to attend university, and the feminist movement did not exist.If that well-off Brit was gay, he could not love openly; sodomy was punishable by death. In the late 1700s, three in four people globally were the victims of some form of forced labour; now less than 1 percent are. In 1700, no one lived in a democracy. Now over half the world does.

When the response to mistakes, failures, and misunderstandings is emotional, psychological, economic, and physical punishment, we breed a culture of fear, secrecy, and

isolation.

So I’m wondering, in a real way: How can we pivot toward practicing transformative justice? How do we shift from individual, interpersonal, and inter-organizational anger toward viable, generative, sustainable systemic change?

In my facilitation and mediation work, I’ve seen three questions that can help us grow. I offer them here in context with a real longing to hear more responses, to get in deep practice that helps us create conditions conducive to life in our movements and communities.

Still, what Chenoweth and Stephan found was dramatic. The Selma march and the larger American civil rights movement were not exceptions. Nonviolent campaigns were ten times more likely to be successful than violent ones. They seem better able to inspire trust between people on opposing sides of a divide, reduce the doubting churn that otherwise exists between them, and thus enable more cooperation going forward. As Chenoweth put it in an interview with the Harvard Gazette in 2019, “Countries in which there were nonviolent campaigns were about 10 times likelier to transition to democracies within a five-year period compared to countries in which there were violent campaigns— whether the campaigns succeeded or failed.”

The Selma marchers, in their willingness to suffer people’s inhumanity out of faith in people’s ultimate humanity, had tapped into a less obvious but long understood source of power.

Second, these efforts should involve the participation of as many people as possible. When people feel they haven’t been heard they tend not to trust. But when their input is a regular, normalized part of how a setting functions, they’re better able to trust it even when they disagree.