Building a Trust Architecture for Your New Team
CIO, Wednesday, October 21st, 2026
Cengage CIO Ken Grady explains how a new CIO can build trust deliberately through technical, investment and human 'currencies'.
Cengage CIO Ken Grady, a CIO for nearly 20 years, notes that a new CIO's track record means little to a team that has never seen it, and he describes building trust as an architecture made of three currencies.
Technical currency means respecting the team's expertise, investment currency means being able to explain ROI, NPV and technical-debt trade-offs, and human currency means answering the non-technical questions people are afraid to ask.
Grady says a steady cadence of conversations matters as much as their content.
As an example, he created a monthly Enterprise Architecture Review with no agenda, where engineers talk openly about what is and isn't working.