Trust is a precious component of good relationships. It’s easy to recognize, more difficult to precisely define, and takes diligence to foster.
I suggest that trust is a complex function of competence and character, intersecting with the people’s prior experiences. Math form:
Trust = f(competence, character) | (prior experiences)
Here are some facts about trust, true at interpersonal levels, organization levels, and more:
1. Relationship trust accelerates working effectiveness by reducing friction and doubts. Trust is valuable in ways that can’t be fully captured in a spreadsheet.
2. You can only operate on trust indirectly; it’s an emergent property in relationships. You can’t command someone to trust you or trust you more.
3. A person’s self-narratives are not easily shifted or changed.
4. Trust is much more complex than a display of sincerity or authenticity. Sincerity is not a measure of truth. Authenticity is not a measurement of competence (e.g., people can be authentic jerks and nincompoops). People are not easy to fool, and those who do get fooled will never trust again.
5. Withdrawals from the “trust account” require many deposits to come back to even.
6. When trust is low, people rightly expect compensation. They could want more money, more favors, a higher interest rate, perks, a future promise, etc., but something must be provided to compensate for low trust.
Given these facts, looking at the landscape of collapsing trust in public institutions larger and smaller, what can we do? So much depends on specifics, so I can only speak generally.
First, avoid an impulsive response. The simplistic answer is to point fingers, retreat away from engagement at all as if avoiding a moral contaminant, and demand every institution be broken down. Institutions, like biological systems, have a way of slowly declining until there is a rapid final collapse. They can linger at some level for a long time, gasping for breath and relevance. Tearing them down before the final collapse requires violence or at least the threat of violence. As Shakespeare had King Lear say, “That way lies madness.” Believing “It will be different this time” is ignoring the weight of historical examples.
There can be institutions which simply need to be ended and discarded. Slavery. Human trafficking. Maybe drug cartels? This requires collective will and significant sustained power (with at least the threat of violence) because many people benefit from the existing institution.
Changing an institution that has lost trust occurs stepwise. Forgiveness is necessary when people have been wronged, and then there must be justice. (Deep sidebar topic: Without forgiveness, you’re seeking vengeance rather than justice.) Justice often requires removing people from positions of authority in an institution. We must examine people, processes and practices, and how the institution fits into the larger world. You nearly always need people from ‘outside’ the institution to accomplish this.
Replacing corrupt institution leadership and practices that destroyed trust requires deep people who can do the hard and heroic work of re-establishing trust. This is a long, difficult journey. Success demands someone called to this challenge, because the obstacles and slog will chew up anyone else.
We can also build new institutions that serve a similar purpose alongside the old institution. Fresh starts don’t have the same trust problems even though they have fresh problems. We can deconstruct why the old institutions failed and put in guardrails against those specific points of failure. A somewhat parallel institution can carry forward when the old institution finally unravels.
In all cases, we’re going to need sustained wisdom.
