Investing in and Designing for Trust

"Bank" in Kano, Nigeria

I spent the first half of 2008 helping a network of reproductive health leaders across several developing countries find ways to collaborate more effectively with each other. As part of this work, I spent a week working with leaders in Kano, Nigeria. When I first arrived there, I asked my host to show me where the local bank was so that I could exchange some currency. He explained that people in Kano don’t go to banks. Thieves knew to hang out there, and even if you managed to avoid getting robbed, you couldn’t trust the banks to give you real currency.

Instead, he introduced me to a guy in a red truck parked outside of a Chinese restaurant, and he negotiated an exchange. When I asked him how he knew where to go and whom to trust, he explained that it was largely word of mouth — family, friends of friends, etc. But he also made it clear that word of mouth wasn’t consistently trustworthy either, and that you had to remain constantly vigilant. Constant vigilance meant constant stress, which is what I felt throughout my trip knowing that I couldn’t trust the institutions that I generally depended on here in the U.S. However, relationships still mattered. Knowing and trusting a few core locals enabled me to acclimate quickly and even learn to thrive.

The Problem with Structure

Trust is an essential part of effective collaboration. Without it, most groups fall apart. However, we are often naive in how we design for trust.

Consider decision-making. One of the easiest ways to gauge how much a group trusts each other is to look at its governance structure. In high-trust groups, people assume that everyone will do what it takes to make the best decisions. Sometimes, this means reaching out to others for discussion and pushback. Other times, it means being proactive about making decisions, understanding that it’s impossible to know everything in advance and that mistakes will happen. These groups often get away with minimal, mostly informal governance structures.

In low-trust groups, people fear that they won’t be properly represented and that others won’t make good decisions on their own, so they insist on being part of every decision. Decision-making is often time-consuming and ineffective as a result. These groups often try to compensate by adding more rigid, formal governance structures.

High-trust groups are about forgiveness. Low-trust groups are about permission.

Even though rigid, overly formal structures are often a symptom of low-trust groups, we often try to compensate for this by creating additional — you guessed it — rigid, overly formal structures. The problem isn’t that new structures can’t help. It’s that the structures we choose don’t necessarily increase trust and may even serve to impede it.

For example, many international aid organizations require some sort of government involvement in order to ensure that money goes to the right places and is used in the right ways. Their assumption is that government is the most trustworthy way for this to happen. As I saw firsthand in Nigeria, this assumption is sometimes wrong, and the work suffers as a result.

There are two ways to navigate around this. The first is to remember that there are other ways to invest in trust beyond building new structures — specifically, investing in relationships. The second is to think more intentionally and creatively about the structures you build.

Investing in Relationships

In 2012, I co-led a multistakeholder process called the Delta Dialogues focused on California water issues. California has been embroiled in a complex and expensive debate over water policy for several years. Rather than propose an alternative policy process, we chose to augment the existing processes by focusing on trust-building between key players.

We mostly focused on building shared understanding using sophisticated mapping tools, but we also placed a huge emphasis on getting to know each other as people. For example:

  • Whenever someone joined the Dialogues, we asked them to share their favorite place in the Delta.
  • Rather than seek a “neutral” location for our meetings, we rotated locations among the participants, so that everyone could see and experience each other’s workplace.
  • We assigned each participant a buddy, and we asked that they talk to each other before and after each meeting.

Journalist, Joe Mathews, who covered the Dialogues, later wrote:

Participants would say the field trips in general were the most valuable part of the Dialogues. All of the participants had lived or done work on the Delta. But even those who had spent their whole lives living in the Delta had seen only parts of the massive estuary. To get a guided tour from another participant and see a piece of the Delta through that person’s eyes proved to be invaluable.

Campbell Ingram [director of the Delta Conservancy, and our client] expressed some embarrassment that the experience of this field trip was so new. “I was pretty amazed that I spent so many years at the BDCP table [the water policy discussion] without that gut level understanding of what it means to be a pear farmer in the Delta. I always thought pear farming was in decline, and then got to see and hear reality, and their issues with their inability to plan. To me, that had a huge impact. It made me feel really uncomfortable. I think a lot of us had the realization that the degree to which we had overlooked the Delta in these processes.”

…

Outside the meetings and field trips, the Dialogues were deepening and taking root in ways that the facilitators couldn’t see. The participants found they liked each other. And they began to talk and meet outside the Dialogues.

These personal relationships and conversations would be among the most treasured products of the Dialogues. Many of these connections were of the strange bedfellows variety.”

Assuming Trust

Most structures — from governance to physical structures — are designed with low-trust in mind. Consider the humble traffic light. The fundamental assumption underlying its design is that we cannot trust people to negotiate intersections with each other in a safe, efficient manner. But what if we could? What might intersections look like then?

Traffic engineer Hans Monderman’s answer to this question was a traffic circle. As it turns out, traffic circles are safer and more efficient than traffic lights. Giving control back to the drivers forces them to be more present and more diligent, which results in better outcomes.

Similarly, most websites have login credentials and access permissions. They assume that without gatekeepers, people will just go around breaking things. While these websites are decent at keeping bad guys out, they are also surprisingly bad at allowing good guys to get in. Most of us believe that this is an unfortunate, but necessary tradeoff.

Wikis flip this assumption around. They assume that most people are intelligent and want to do good, that if you trust people by default, good things will happen. Wikis not only allow anyone to edit them, they do not impose any kind of editorial workflow. They assume that good, smart people will figure out for themselves how to create the highest quality content. Wikipedia — the most prominent of all wikis — is a devastating example of this principle operating at massive scale.

Wikis still have structure, only their structures are designed to reinforce, rather than replace, trustworthy behaviors. For example, wikis maintain a copy of all prior revisions. This encourages people to try things, knowing that their mistakes can be easily reverted. People’s contribution histories also serve as a kind of currency that helps reinforce their trustworthiness.

When you design for trust, the results are often simpler and more elegant (and sometimes counter-intuitive). These designs give up control rather than assert it, resulting in greater agility and higher quality.

However, designing for trust doesn’t work so well if you don’t have trust in the first place. Organizational forms without explicit hierarchy have existed for decades, but recent instantiations like Holocracy have recently become popular, especially in the technology sector. What people are starting to realize is that trust is a critical ingredient to make this work, lack of trust is often a cultural problem, and eliminating structure does not solve anything if your problem is with culture.

Structure and trust have a tumultuous relationship, but if we start with some basic principles, we can harness both to create higher-quality collaboration. Invest in relationships, then design structures that reinforce, rather than replace, trust.

Special thanks goes to Jerry Michalski, who — when we first met 12 years ago — first provoked me with the question, “What if we trusted people?” I’ve been pondering that question ever since.

Tic-Tac-Toe and the Squirm Test: Building Trust and Shared Understanding

Elliott's Monster Face

Trust. Shared understanding. Shared language. I constantly mention these as critical elements of collaboration. But how do we develop these things, and how do we know if we’ve got them?

We can start by playing Tic-Tac-Toe, then by applying the Squirm Test.

Tic-Tac-Toe

Many years ago, one of my mentors, Jeff Conklin, taught me a simple exercise that gave me a visceral understanding of why trust, shared understanding, and shared language were so important, as well as some clues for how to develop these things.

First:

  1. Find a partner.
  2. Play Tic-Tac-Toe.

Try it now! What happened?

Hopefully, nobody won, but don’t stress too much if you lost. It happens!

Second: Play Tic-Tac-Toe again, except this time, don’t use pen or paper.

Try it now! What happened?

In order to play, you needed to come up with shared language to describe positions on the board. You probably managed, but it was almost certainly harder.

Third:

  1. Play Tic-Tac-Toe without pen or paper again, except, this time, play on a four-by-four board — four rows, four columns.
  2. Play until it’s too hard to play anymore, until someone has won, or until there’s a dispute about what the board looks like. When you’re done, both you and your partner should draw what you think the board looks like without looking at each other’s work. Now compare.

Try it now! What happened?

Research suggests that we can hold between five to nine thoughts in our head at a time before our short-term memory begins to degrade. This is why American phone numbers have seven digits. It’s also why three-by-three Tic-Tac-Toe (nine total squares) without pen and paper felt hard, but doable, whereas increasing the board by just one row and column (sixteen total squares) made the game feel impossible.

How many ideas do you think you’re holding in your head after just five minutes of moderately complex conversation? How often are you using some kind of shared display — a whiteboard, a napkin, the back of an envelope — to make sure that everyone is tracking the same conversation?

While you were playing, how much did you trust that the two of you were seeing the same board at all times? Were you right?

In cooperation theory, the most successful groups trust each other by default. You almost certainly assumed that your partner knew the rules of Tic-Tac-Toe and was playing it fairly to the best of his or her ability. If you already had a strong relationship with your partner, you probably trusted him or her even more.

But trust is fragile, and it’s not always relational. If it’s not constantly being reinforced, it weakens. A lack of shared understanding is one of the easiest ways to undermine trust.

With the Delta Dialogues, we were dealing with a uniquely wicked and divisive issue — water in California. As a facilitator, you always want to get the group out of scarcity thinking. But water is a zero-sum game, and no amount of kumbaya is going to change that. Moreover, we were dealing with a half-century legacy of mistrust and a group of participants who were constantly in litigation with each other.

We did a lot of unique, relational work that played an important role in the success of Phase 1 — rotating site visits, asking people to share their favorite places in the Delta, implementing a buddy system, leaving plenty of space for breaking bread. But we were not relying on these things alone to build trust.

Our focus was on building shared understanding through a mapping process that allowed the group to see their ideas and track their conversations in real-time. Prior to our process, the group had been attempting to play multi-dimensional Tic-Tac-Toe with thousands of rows and columns… and no pen and paper. We brought the pen and paper, along with the ability to wield it skillfully.

Like many of my colleagues, I believe strongly in building and modeling a culture where people are engaging in powerful, constructive, sometimes difficult conversation. Unfortunately, it’s not enough to get people into a circle and to have them hold hands and talk about their feelings. The more wicked the problem, the more inadequate our traditional conversational tools become, no matter how skillfully they are wielded.

This recognition is what separates the Garfield Foundation’s Collaborative Networks initiative from similar well-intentioned, but misguided initiatives in the nonprofit and philanthropic worlds, and it’s why I’m working with them right now. We happen to be employing system mapping (and the talents of Joe Hsueh) right now as our “pen and paper” for developing that shared understanding, but it’s how and why we’re mapping — not the specific tool itself — that separates our efforts from other processes.

The Squirm Test

How do you know how much shared understanding you have in the first place? And if you choose to employ some version of “pen and paper” to help develop that shared understanding, how do you know whether or not you’re intervention is effective?

Many years ago, I crafted a thought experiment for doing exactly that called the Squirm Test.

  1. Take all of the people in your group, and have them sit on their hands and in a circle.
  2. Have one person get up and spend a few minutes describing what the group is doing and thinking, and why.
  3. Repeat until everyone has spoken.

You can measure the amount of shared understanding in the group by observing the amount of squirming that happened during the presentations. More squirming means less shared understanding.

You can implement the Squirm Test in all sorts of ways, and it even appears in different high-performance communities in real-life. For example, the Wikipedia principle of Neutral Point of View is essentially the Squirm Test in action. If you read an article on Wikipedia, and it makes you squirm, edit it until the squirming goes away. If enough people do that, then that article will accurately reflect the shared understanding of that group of people and will thus achieve Neutral Point of View.

Toward the end of Phase 1 of the Delta Dialogues, we designed a whole day around the Squirm Test. We had participants capture on flipcharts what they thought the interests and concerns were of the other stakeholder groups. Then we had participants indicate whether these points represented themselves accurately and whether they found shared understanding on certain issues surprising. There was very little squirming and quite a bit of surprise about that fact. It was a turning point for the process, because the participants were able to see in a visceral way how much shared understanding had been built through all of their hard work together.

Last week, I was describing the Squirm Test to Rick Reed, the leader of Garfield Foundation’s Collaborative Networks initiative. He pointed out a discrepancy that I had not thought of before. “People might not be squirming because there’s no shared understanding. They might be squirming because, after seeing the collective understanding, they realize that they’re wrong!”

This is exactly what happened with the Garfield Foundation’s first Collaborative Network initiative, RE-AMP. When you are able to see the whole system, including your place in it, you may discover that your frame is wrong. The kind of squirming that Rick describes is the good kind. Understanding how to design for it is a topic for another day!