‘Negative Ishikawa’ and trust

Trust thought for today - a corker of an exercise for you! This works in lots of different contexts. I love it.

In his talk at the launch of Prof Chris Hodges' new book Outcome-Based Cooperation, the government Chief Ombudsman Matthew Vickers made us do a fantastic exercise. He called it a ‘Negative Ishikawa’ after the Ishikawa diagram, a management tool used to identify problems in a system, named after Japanese engineer Kaoru Ishikawa who developed the method in the 1960s.

It's fabulously simple:

1. Identify how you would destroy trust.
2. Compare it to how you currently behave.
3. Then think what you should do instead.

The examples Matt's audience came up with included: "We don’t do what we say we would; we don’t follow the rules; we make outrageous statements; we undermine confidence in power networks; we send conflicting messages; we use difficult language; we don’t lead by example; we set conditions but leave execution to others".

So many of them are what we do all the time. And wonder why trust is falling!

I've tried it in a couple of other scenarios, it is very funny. Except it's not.

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