trust and its potential effect on innovation

While catching up on some reading, I came across an interesting interview with one of the authors of an article in the Harvard Business School Working Knowledge. In the original article about plumbers and their trust relationships, the authors found that while trust makes existing relationships more productive, it also has a negative effect. In this environment, strong trust relationships acted as a barrier to investigation of new possibilities that existed outside the domain of the trusted relationships. This is why it is so important for our social networks to be broad and widely encompassing. When they are limited, both personally and organizationally, they can act as an inherently limiting force in exploring new ideas and possibilities. Ultimately this has a negative effect on our own growth as well as that of our organizations.