What is trust?
I've literally come across hundreds of definitions of trust in my career. Here's one that'll give you the clarity you need to start designing a more trustworthy organisation.
Trust is studied in philosophy, sociology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, economics and many other fields. Problematically, the royal we can’t seem to agree on a definition.
Here’s a small selection I’ve come across over the years:
A set of behaviours, such as acting in ways that depend on another.
A belief in a probability that a person will behave in certain ways.
Hope about expectations fulfilled.
A confident relationship to the unknown.
An abstract mental attitude toward a proposition that someone is dependable.
A complex neural process that binds diverse representations into a semantic pointer that includes emotions.
The extent to which one party is willing to depend on somebody, or something, in a given situation with a feeling of relative security, even though negative consequences are possible.
Other than the second to last (more of a neurobiological view), all of these definitions have similar characteristics.
The three characteristics I believe are most relevant to trust and trustworthiness in the context of organisational design (activities that an organisation executes in their attempt to be worthy of trust in ways that positively impacts trust states) are that:
Trust is relational, contextual, and related to expectations about the future.
Trust seemingly supports decisions and enables generally positive actions (we will cover the downsides of trust in the future).
Trust is necessary for healthy, effective and profitable business operations, amongst other things.
Because of this and plenty more, I often start my work with clients suggesting that we refer to trust as "the belief in another's *trustworthiness"
*the framing here is important as it enables me to focus on designing organisational ‘features’ that align to the qualities of trustworthiness. These qualities of trustworthiness are the indicators people look for in their assessment to help establish their belief in the other party’s trustworthiness. The way someone interacts with these qualities or ‘organisational features’ very likely has a direct impact on trust states (a topic we will explore in an upcoming post). The more consistently positive these 'trust states (trust states are effectively the the intellectual and emotional outcome of the process one party executes to assess the trustworthiness of another), the better the relational dynamics, the greater social licence the organisation has to operate, the more likely ‘customers’ and other parties are to speak favourably of said organisation etc.
2024 update: for the last year or so I’ve transitioned to defining trust as ‘the willingness to be relationally vulnerable based on positive expectations’. Lots of reasons for this, but the TL;DR is that I’ve found the additional nuance more helpful. I’d previously over simplified in an attempt to create enough actionable clarity to encourage positive action. I now find I am still able to achieve this, providing a little extra time is spent.
I also very deliberately refer to trust as a biopsychosocial phenomena. We are approximating what it actually is, and probably ought to be fairly humble about this process. Enough of an update for now :)
In this context, trust is a 'mental process' that one party (let’s say an individual customer) executes in relation to another party (your corporation, government department etc.) that forms a ‘mental state’. So the process the customer engages in helps inform the belief.
I like to situate the metal process and belief or set of feelings the process forms in a cycle of sorts (the inform, guide and reinforce one another). This gives me a fuller picture of the relational context and helps with various activities we will progressively explore in future posts.
Many factors influence how this assessment is made, from one's upbringing, the context of the relationship, the information that is or isn't available and thus the perception of uncertainty, the balance of possible consequences (positive versus negative), and even 'harder' factors such as one's DNA.
An important note: You, as an organisation, cannot ‘control’ these factors. At best you can influence some of them.
Because of this nuance, the idea that trust is the belief in another's trustworthiness (and that this belief is driven by largely 'deliberate' processes) is most likely an oversimplified picture. Trust(worthiness) judgments seem heavily influenced by far more 'automatic' brain processes. This is demonstrated especially well in certain neuroscience experiments, such as the 2014 work from NYU researchers demonstrating that our brains judge the trustworthiness of another’s face before the face can be consciously perceived (the design of this study with masking etc. makes it a very interesting read).
For the sake of pragmatism (from the perspective of decision makers and ‘leaders’ within organisations), it’s important not to get too caught up in this nuance. We don’t want to fall into a rabbit hole that we can’t escape from (our job is hopefully to build organisations that contribute to moral, social and ecological progress - of course doing so in a way that is financially viable - not become full time philosophers). To avoid this, I work with my clients to explicitly focus on what we can directly influence; the ways in which our organisation can consistently showcase and ‘bring to life’ the 7 qualities of trustworthiness (Sutcliffe et al. 2020).
That’s the topic of the next post.
Summary
It might be helpful for you to think of trust as the “belief in another’s trustworthiness”.
This belief about another’s trustworthiness is the result of a mental process that’s influenced by many different factors.
You cannot control trust states (in effect, how much or how little someone trusts you). Instead you should focus on what it means to be trustworthy, then design for that.
There’s plenty more to come.
With love.