Last week I watched a video from Simon Sinek, who said that a good leader gives trust first — and earns it back through their own willingness to grow.
I’d add another layer:
Trusting yourself first.
The belief that you can actually do it.
Every transformation needs that starting point.
But trust has a paradox:
- Too little, and nothing starts.
- Too much, and the risks get ignored.
So the real skill isn’t simply more trust.
It’s having enough trust to move — and enough honesty to stay brutally realistic about the constraints.
Circular transformation makes this particularly difficult
The old linear system is so strong that we keep trying to make new circular solutions work inside it — instead of questioning the system itself.
- The data we need often already exists — but we don’t recognise it as relevant.
- Tasks that make perfect sense in a circular model can look counterproductive by linear KPIs.
- Our business calculations can underestimate the potential because of the mismatch of the logic.
So circular transformation requires a rather uncomfortable kind of trust:
Trust that we can build commercially viable businesses without simply reproducing the same definition of growth we’ve always used.
It means asking whether our definition of economic success is still appropriate for the system we’re trying to build.
Maybe the hardest leap isn’t trusting circularity.
It’s trusting that value creation itself can work differently.