I’m 3,000 words into Chapter 3 of Unfinished, and I keep coming back to the same question: How do you build trust when nothing stays still?
It’s the question I hear in every workshop. Every debrief. Every one-on-one with a design leader who’s exhausted from trying to keep their team grounded while executives pivot strategy every quarter. They’re not asking for stability—they know that’s impossible. They’re asking for a way to move fast without breaking the promises that hold teams together.
This chapter is part memoir, part field guide. I’m weaving together stories from two teams I’ve worked with closely: a fintech group navigating regulatory whiplash, and a health-tech startup trying to balance patient safety with the pressure to ship fast. Both faced the same tension—leaders promising one thing while the reality underneath kept shifting.
Neither team intended to erode trust. But intent doesn’t matter when the gap between promise and behavior keeps widening.
Mapping the Trust Gap
The first section charts what I’m calling the “trust gap”—the distance between what you said would happen and what actually happened. I’ve been visualizing it as a simple axis: perceived promise on one side, actual behavior on the other.
Every time commitments drift without acknowledgment, the gap widens. Every time priorities flip without explanation, trust erodes a little more. The problem isn’t that things change. It’s that we pretend they haven’t.
At SAIL, working on systems that serve 200,000+ users across different contexts, I’ve learned that trust doesn’t break from big betrayals. It breaks from accumulated inconsistencies—the small moments where reality didn’t match expectation, and no one named it.
The chapter argues that design leaders have to name those fractures quickly. Not to assign blame, but to redesign the rituals that caused them. You can’t rebuild trust if you won’t acknowledge where it broke.
Experiments Worth Testing
I’m documenting three experiments that both teams have been testing—practical rituals you can adapt without needing executive buy-in or budget.
Expectation retros
The fintech team borrowed this from product retrospectives but focused it entirely on expectations. After every major release decision, they hold a 20-minute retro dedicated solely to expectations that shifted. Not about what went wrong technically—about what people thought would happen versus what actually happened.
It sounds small. But it turned honesty into a habit. When you create space to name the gap, people stop pretending it doesn’t exist.
Narrated pivots
The health-tech team started recording short Loom videos whenever strategy changed. Not the usual “here’s what we’re building” update, but “here’s what changed and why the change protects the mission.” They explain the reasoning in their own words, show their face, make it human.
Readers of the manuscript will get templates to adapt. The format matters less than the principle: when you pivot, narrate the logic. Show that you know it disrupts expectations. Make the reasoning visible instead of forcing people to guess.
Trust dashboards
We’re prototyping a lightweight dashboard that blends qualitative quotes with a few leading indicators—support tickets clustered by theme, churn signals, employee pulse scores. Nothing fancy. Just enough to keep the conversation grounded in impact rather than intention.
Seeing those data points together keeps leaders honest about the impact of their pivots. It’s easy to say “we’re staying customer-focused” while the support queue fills with frustrated users. The dashboard makes those contradictions harder to ignore.
What I Still Need From You
This chapter is close. But it’s missing something important: voices from outside tech.
The patterns I’m seeing—promise vs. behavior, acknowledged pivots, trust as a measurable gap—they show up everywhere. Public sector teams navigating political shifts. Educators managing parent expectations during curriculum changes. Community organizers keeping volunteers engaged when funding priorities change.
If you’ve navigated trust during rapid change in a context that doesn’t look like mine, I want to hear from you. What rituals helped? What made things worse? Where did the gaps show up that I’m not seeing?
Reply here or reach me directly at haider@stayunfinished.com. The manuscript grows stronger every time new perspectives challenge what I think I know.
Shipping Before We’re Certain
Chapter 3 will land in early access later this month. As always, you’ll get margin notes, facilitation guides, and space to annotate what resonates—or what doesn’t. Some sections will be rough. Some arguments incomplete. That’s the deal.
Stay Unfinished means shipping before we’re certain, refining together, building a living manuscript that evolves as we learn.
Because the alternative—waiting until I have all the answers—means the insights arrive too late to help anyone.
And trust, like everything worth building, gets stronger when we work on it together.
About This Project
Unfinished — a living manuscript about crafting experiences that evolve with people, systems, and time explores why inherited frameworks persist long after they stop serving us—and how teams can build systems that stay honest when everything moves.
I’m Haider Ali, a Digital Experience Design Architect at the Saudi Accelerated Innovation Lab (SAIL) at Aramco. I work on AI-powered systems that augment human capability, enterprise experiences at scale, and the messy reality of building trust when both technology and expectations won’t stay still.
For more on trust design, research that drives action, and questioning inherited thinking:
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