The project team warned me about him before I arrived at the venue

Dave, not his real name, had been arrested and was in the local paper months earlier, over a different matter entirely, nothing to do with the road safety project we were there to talk about. His reputation reached the marae before he did. The project team called him a troublemaker. I filed that in the back of my mind and got on with setting up the room.

The local hapū had offered their beautiful space for a community meeting on safety improvements to the road and the kura. I'd arrived early by myself to put up a spider wall, a collapsible display board that opens out wide and tall, well past the reach of my five foot frame. I got it half unfolded and stood there working out whether a chair would help or make the whole thing worse. It's a two-person job, and assembly has never been my strength.

A man walked in with kind eyes and an easy smile, and I introduced myself. It was Dave.

His past wasn't my business that evening. He'd come to find out what was happening to his road and his kura, the same as anyone else arriving early, and when he saw me struggling with the board he asked if I'd mind him chipping in.

Of course I wouldn't. A six foot frame has its advantages, reaching the top of a spider wall among them, along with the top supermarket shelf, but that's a different newsletter.

We solved it together. If something didn't sit right we tried a different angle, and when that didn't work either we found a third way. We had some laughs along the way, and while I couldn't tell you now what about, I do remember my big belly laugh making its grand entrance, slightly missized as always on a five foot frame.

While we worked on the board we talked about the project, and I learned what he cared about rather than what the paper had said about him. When the project manager arrived I could pass that on in ways that helped the conversation, because by then I wasn't reading the room cold. Dave and I had already solved a problem together.

That conversation has never left me, because every time I drive through that area I see the pou and the native plantings standing alongside the safety improvements, and I think about a spider wall.

Here's what I've come to believe. A meeting room is not always where trust gets built, sometimes it's the worst possible place for it.

The obvious objection is that meetings work fine most of the time, and plenty of real trust gets built in a meeting room format. That's true, and I'm not arguing meetings are broken. But they're not the only tool, and for some people they're the wrong one.

Scott Wiltermuth and Chip Heath found in 2009, published in Psychological Science, that people who moved in synchrony with each other afterward reported higher trust and cooperation than people who didn't, even when the movement had nothing to do with the task in front of them. A meeting asks people to perform, while a shared physical task removes the performance. Nobody is presenting, nobody is defending a position, you're simply two people trying to get a folding board to stand up straight.

I noticed the pattern long before I had a word for it. As a teenager I often joined my mum on her afternoon dog walk at half past four. I'd chat on my way into the house after school, distracted, hungry and half present from the day's teenage dramas, but the conversations that mattered always happened on the walk. Something about moving forward side by side made the hard things easier to say than facing each other across the breakfast bar ever did.

I think about that now when a stakeholder relationship hits its hardest patch. Twelve months into negotiations, someone changes their tune or throws a curve ball nobody saw coming, and the instinct is always to solve it through a meeting. Sometimes the better move is to find something to do together instead. A site visit. A walk through the area. A tactile activity with an unglamorous outcome. The conversation that matters tends to arrive sideways, while people's hands are busy with something else.

Dave became part of a small group of stakeholders who met with us regularly for the rest of that project, people who cared deeply about the outcome and the surrounds for their whānau. None of it started in a meeting - it started with a spider wall neither of us could put up alone.

I'd like to ask you something, because it makes everything I write here better. I'm not collecting the responses for anything, aside from pure interest and serving you the best I can. If there's a stakeholder situation you're chewing on right now, a curve ball twelve months into a project, a room that won't move, a person the team has already written off, tell me about it. Reply to this email. I read every one myself, and I answer them.

The Conditions for Trust Network opens its first cohort on 11 August, with founding member places limited to the first 25 people. It's built for exactly this kind of judgement, knowing when the meeting room is working against you and what to do instead. If that's familiar territory, you can register your interest now and be among the first to know when founding member places open.

Find out more, or register your interest here - Conditions for Trust Network.