5 things to know about trust for ‘The Great Reset’

The theme of Davos this year is ‘Rebuilding Trust’. As I have just spent two years researching trust, here are five things that Davos leaders might find useful to consider:

1. Refocus on being trustworthy — get back to basics

The 2020 Global Satisfaction with democracy report concluded: “…if satisfaction with democracy is now falling across many of the world’s largest mature and emerging democracies… it is not because citizens’ expectations are excessive or unrealistic, but because democratic institutions are falling short of the outcomes that matter most for their legitimacy, including probity in office, upholding the rule of law, responsiveness to public concerns, ensuring economic and financial security, and raising living standards for the larger majority of society.”

This seeming lack of trustworthiness correlates quite directly to the issues behind the lack of trust in governments according to the 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer. (See below)

To re-build trust, governments need to be more trustworthy and to set aside petty political infighting and focus on and deliver against the reasonable expectations of their citizens.

2. Transform the metrics and incentives

The ‘good intent’ which is key to perceptions of trustworthiness in governments and business, is undermined by the perverse incentives and metrics which prioritise the making of money over anything else.

The Forum is rightly drawing attention to the importance of ‘Stakeholder Capitalism’ — moving away from shareholder value as the only measure of success for companies. This will be fundamental. I first got involved in the movement for ‘stakeholder capitalism’ in 1996, we thought the moment had come. But sadly not. The key is investors and shareholders — until venture capital companies, mainstream institutional investors and ordinary shareholders ask different questions about the impact of their investments nothing will change. No sign yet with the billions being piling cash into digital wonder companies with the no questions asked except about the ‘narrative’ of the often fictional route to making money.

But if governments are also measuring the wrong things, business metrics on their own won’t do the trick. GDP measures the wrong things. Measuring the right things will give governments, business and citizens the knowledge they need to take the brave and challenging steps required to move to a more people- and planet-centred way of living.

GDP fails on so many levels — it measures wealth and ignores its distribution. It fails to even register the human and financial costs of capitalism, “externalities” such as social welfare, environmental degradation and the social, mental and physical health costs of innovations.

Dissatisfaction with GDP is widespread, and there are many alternatives being trialled that focus on the well-being of people and planet: for example the UN’s Human Development and Social Development Indexes, WellBeing metrics, Genuine Progress Indicators, a Happy Planet Index and an initiative to use Gross National Happiness.

“What gets measured gets managed” is the old adage. Any attempt to rebuild trust needs to take that lesson firmly to its heart and refocus metrics and incentives to demonstrate the good intent which is essential to trust and deliver what really matters to citizens both now and in the future.

3. Show your workings — provide evidence of your trustworthiness

If you are home schooling a young child in maths at the moment you will perhaps have had the talk about the importance of showing your workings. “It’s not enough just to come up with the answer,” you will say, “you need to demonstrate how you came to your conclusions, how are we to know it’s not just a guess.”

It’s the same for earning trust. It’s unlikely to be enough to be trustworthy, and silent. Evidence of your trustworthiness is also important. Organisations of all types — particularly governments and business — have to try much harder to demonstrated that they can be trusted by being much more open, honest and communicative about the steps they are taking to be trustworthy, particularly that they are taking society’s interests to heart and not simply focusing on the next election or the bottom line.

4. Let go — trust your citizens

If you trust people first, they are more likely to be trustworthy and to trust you back. But governments on the whole don’t seem to trust their citizens. Political elites, particularly those of authoritarian inclination, feel that without their superior knowledge and expertise citizens unleashed would drag society down into anarchy and chaos. But as Rutger Bregman in his book HumanKind so eloquently describes, this is a fiction. People are on the whole trustworthy, cooperative, kind and altruistic. He goes on to show it is the desire by the powerful to hold on to what they have, and the systems and metrics they create to hold on to their power and supposedly avert this imagined chaos, which are the root of the problem.

The Covid pandemic has shown that ‘I know best, do as you are told’ styles of working are much less effective and that trusting those on the front line works best. Decentralised systems which put power and delivery in the hands of local people and institutions, including citizens, has been shown to work so much better than trying to control from the centre.

One of the countries most effective in handling the Covid crisis is Taiwan, and Digital Minister Audrey Tang says it is neither a cultural phenomenon which many imagine resulting in greater compliance, nor the tech behind their track and trace which is behind their success. The key is to trust citizens and to prove you are worthy of their trust. Radical transparency and a commitment to trustworthiness is the focus, with respect and empowerment of citizens at the heart of the approach. “If the government trusts civil society then the citizens will eventually trust back, but the government has to make the first moves.”

5. Earning trust is both a science and an art

In my report on Trust and Tech Governance I concluded that the earning of trust is both a science and an art. The ‘science’ focuses on institutional delivery against the competencies and values which demonstrate trustworthiness and the ‘art’ is the self-reflection, humility and compassion required to really understand and align one’s approach with the shifting (and sometimes conflicting) ethics, values and aspirations of society.

None of this is easy, it takes a conscious commitment and considerable effort. But then again things worth having — like trust — most often do.