I just recently took part in an historic workshop in the former Yugoslavia. The presidents of four young republics - Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzogovina - gathered together on the island of Brijuni, a retreat site often used by the former Yugoslav leader Tito. The Croatian-based Foundation 2020 invited me to take part as an outside advisor.

The theme of the workshop was both simple and profound given the recent history of the region: What are the terms of trust? The topic led to additional questions at the workshop: How do nation-states grow to trust each other?; How do citizens learn to trust state institutions?; How do customers learn to trust business enterprises?

I was asked to offer a concise definition of trust, and this is what I shared: Trust sets an environment of reliable conditions that enable an agent to make a judgment of how much to risk.

Maybe it would help if I put that in personal terms. I'm sure you know people that you like as friends, but you don't really trust them. They are not sufficiently reliable, and you choose not to become vulnerable with them in a way that might hurt you. On the flip side of the coin, there are people whom you'd rather not hang out with socially, but you do trust them. Usually we turn to our experience when making these judgments, but many of us also lean on our intuition.

Trust is more complex when it comes to collective bodies, like a government body or a business firm. We still bank on our experience, but we also look for protocols that will guarantee fairness and accountability. Institutions will fail; that is a historic fact. But it matters to us how they deal with their failures and rectify events of injustice.

It brings to mind an investigation I did of the ServiceMaster Corporation when I was writing my most recent book. ServiceMaster discovered that when it acted promptly, and authentically, to solve a customer error, the customer's reported trust in the company grew. In fact, the reported levels of trust grew higher in those circumstances than it did for customers who never reported a failure of service.

Back to the former Yugoslavia, it was not easy to talk about trust in a judicial system when so many villains were never brought to justice. In Bosnia-Herzogovina alone, the president of that republic reminded us, over 200,000 innocent civilians lost their lives. Can we go forward and build trust when we have not rectified the past? Yet, can we ever escape the cycles of revenge that keep the present a prisoner of the past? I left the workshop with those questions swimming in my mind.

As citizens, consumers, workers and investors, we yearn for conditions of reliablity. Insecurity, on the other hand, kills relationships. In the region of the former Yugoslavia, those words move beyond hyperbole.