How to Avoid Catalysing Distrust

Trust thought for today - riffing off the FT (sorry paywall) probably the most valuable finding of my trust project: to avoid catalysing distrust, you have to take seriously the people you don't take seriously.

All disasters which cause massive problems and breakdowns of trust, someone, somewhere has been warning about its potential or calling out the problem - often for years. Usually an employee, NGO, journalist, academic. (Post Office, Chernobyl, most oil spills, financial crisis, Mad Cow Disease pretty much every one you can think of). They were ignored, fired, silenced.

But changing your behaviour based on the views of people you think are irrelevant is incredibly hard. We almost never do it. Climate activists have been 'right' about climate change, negative externalities and the importance of the intrinsic value of nature for decades, only now with evidence of disaster looming close are we actually listening and calling it a shift in mainstream societal values that must be responded to. Pity we didn't listen earlier when they were the 'loony fringe'.

I once wrote a blog 'How to tell a nutter from an early warning'. Must dig it out and see how naive or helpful it was!

Read the full article here: https://www.ft.com/content/0bce654c-74bd-47eb-aed4-4c9a8e065467