The Fall of the Trust Fall

Gleefully punching down on a corporate tradition

The Trust Fall: we all know what it is, even if we’ve never done one. Culture has this power. At this point, hearing about a Trust Fall probably brings about a quaint smile which is the cherry atop your pile of disdain, much like you experience seeing a ridiculous fashion that once dominated your wardrobe. Like tight jeans. Or loose jeans.

The bizarre phenomenon of the Trust Fall is a story worth telling. It represents so much of what’s rightfully scorned about crafty adult learning experiences. The Trust Fall is a suitcase for your cynicism, and despite the fact that well-crafted team experiences demonstrably increase innovation, retention, and decision speed, we tend to enter these settings with a healthy bit of hesitation.

Or maybe a ton of it.

Thank you, Trust Fall.

In the ‘80s and ‘90s Corporate America turned ratcheted up the dials on development budgets that often spawned retreats, wherein The Workforce would gather in windowless conference rooms for multi day extravaganzas in Management’s hope they’d become fitter-happier-more-productive. I’d love to discover the story of some conniving event salesperson who figured out they could make an utter killing off their empty ballrooms on weekdays, in between their wedding bookings. I’ve not yet found the story, but I think it must be out there, along with that very salesperson lighting Cohibas with $100 bills on the deck of their 200-ft yacht. If it weren’t for the Trust Fall and its attendant truckloads of development dollars, who knows what dingy little tavern this ballroom salesman would be drinking away his retirement in.

Once you’ve got money flowing into anything, it’s only natural for those anythings to develop. And even though a lot of the world changes, a lot of the world also stays the same. Whether it was Xerox leaders meeting at some Wichita Radisson in 1993 or Anthropic’s executives having a northern California camping retreat in 2023, the things they’re all seeking to improve are nearly identical: trust, communication, alignment. Reduce the glut of meetings. Excommunicate the fax machine that’s inundated with spam for those Japanese knives that can cut pennies in half. Okay wait, that’s only a 1993 thing.

I admire the experience design that went into the first attempt at having a person fall backward into the Great Abyss, beyond which waited their eager peers with arms outstretched. It was surely a novel and mildly traumatic event that took a quarter of a day and yielded reams of chain-faxes for weeks after.

But then, as with many chariots, our beloved Trust Fall turned back into a pumpkin. The courageous Denise-from-Marketing who took that first Trust Fall under the gaudy chandeliers of that Wichita ballroom finds herself holding back half her update in the next team meeting for fear of useless criticism and another quarter of her update because that weasel Jeff-from-Sales is obviously going to take her ideas and say they’re his own, like he’s been doing for seven goddamn years.

What’s the remedy? Another round of Trust Falls?

There are a bunch of reasons why Trust Falls are the piñata of development experiences, and here’s a big one: the trust you need to fall backward into a group of peers has very little to do with the trust you need to share openly, collaborate, and do solid work. Yes, there’s some bit of courage that’s required in both, but that’s like saying there’s some heat involved in frying an egg and also in smelting steel. The functional sort of trust that enables better work happens with consistent, repeated examples, like in any relationship. The moments that build trust are likely hundreds of small, missable moments.

Of course, on occasion an emergency arises and you hope your partner or teammate is there to help you deal with it, and that will definitely garner extra trust-points, but if all you and your team ever deal with together are emergencies, you are living under a terrible hex and must find a sorcerer immediately.

The Trust Fall is neither of these things. A person in a shoulder-padded suit falling backward off a banquet table is not a benign, everyday occurrence, and it’s also not a real emergency. The Trust Fall is likely reviled because it demands people get into an emergency state of mind, and then doesn’t even deliver the goods after it’s over. We all know about The Boy Who Cried Wolf – how about the same story from the other perspective: The Town With That Idiot Kid Who Kept Calling Us Out Of Our Beds At Night? The title doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue (or fit on the cover of a book), but you know what the point is? The people in the town hate the kid because he’s doing the exact same thing to them as the Trust Fall does to the retreat participants in that Wichita ballroom.

Now, if something maybe-kinda works and requires discomfort from the people involved, fine. You probably won’t discover it as the butt of every corporate retreat joke two decades later, even if people don’t look forward to it. The real fall of the Trust Fall – and the way out of this mess – is that the Trust Fall is a one-size-fits-all attempt to fix some very complex human problems.

You read that right, Ms. Engineer-Optimize-Everything. There is no One Best Way to deal with the impossibly complex dynamics that emerge from groups of hard-charging people under tight deadlines with ambiguous tasks and annoying bosses. The Trust Fall is a product you pull right off the shelf, crack the package, inflate to 37 PSI, and (at least the claims will tell you), and it will once-and-for-all solve your trust & communication problems, along with blindness, leprosy, and bad debt.

Anything making such a wild claim deserves the misfortune the Trust Fall has been saddled with. People are complex. Actually, people are relatively simple compared to how groups are complex. And being this complex, they need the consideration of a thoughtful designer to first hear how they describe their struggles, and then put a bunch of those versions together into a messy whole, because everyone has a different story.

And then – and only then – might some magical plan come together in the laboratory of this careful experience designer, who may eventually find themselves lighting cigars on the back of giant yachts. But for the moment, cigars & yachts are distant and inconsequential. Helping teams get better works. Asking people to form a line and sequentially fall off a table doesn’t. It might be some new task that looks remarkably similar and feigns intensity, but in all these things it’s best to know when to retire the thing, and with most of these, it’s not long after it’s been used for the first time.