In my recent article on the
role of trust in knowledge management, I discussed trust as an action.
Something I do to jump over uncertainties in decisions or choices I have to
make. In another thread on
the same topic, Gary
Lawrence Murphy plays devil’s advocate and challenges this view of trust as
an action, as a verb. I begged to disagree with him and then I said something
that already sounded odd when I wrote it, and that my thoughts kept returning to
since:
It is my action, it is me that willingly ignores the uncertainty
and moves ahead. Trust is what I need to make a choice/decision and carry it
out. Trust is not a commodity that resides in the one I am trusting. If I
trust someone to be responsive to me,it actually means to me that I need LESS
trust to be able to reach a decision, whether to engage with this person or
not. By showing trust, i.e. jumping over uncertainties, I build
relationships with other people. The result of these actions is a trusting
relationship, where the trust invested by me (and not the initial
trustworthiness of the other: again, it is not a commodity) leads to less
uncertainties (for me) in the next choices/decisions I may have to make in that
relationship.
I have made the part I found odd bold. What was I saying
here: if I trust someone I need less trust? This morning under the shower I came
up with this tentative explanation: I have defined trust as an action. By
jumping over my uncertainties on the outcome of a decision I come to the
decision. I trust my decision to work out ok.
If this decision
concerns a relationships with someone else, and if my decision works out, we
normally say that this means the other can be trusted. However based on my
definition the trust was in making the decision. The fact that it worked out
actually gave me proof that next time for the same decision, the uncertainties
might be less. And therefore my leap of faith might be smaller to come to the
same decision again.
So if we say we trust someone, this means that we
recognize a consistent pattern of behaviour, and a certain level of
predictability (reputation) in the other which is strong enough to reduce the
uncertainties I may have in making choices/decisions with the other as
counterpart. So I need to excersize less trust, because I can trust the other
based on his track-record. Then a trusting relationship is not a relationship
where the actions of both counterparts require high levels of trust (as an
action) but a place where there is proof of these high levels in the past,
actually resulting in less need of trust as an action in the here and now.

Of course this will need frequent enough positive feedback, reaffirmation.
This because we deal with estimates of uncertainties. If I betray a trusting
relationship, what I actually do is saying to the other that the his/her
uncertainty estimate based on my reputation is a miscalculation. Then the other
has to trust enormously to be able to reinvest in a relationship: what he/she
thought was a reliable certainty turned out to be a huge uncertainty. It is when
this newly required leap of faith is too big that a relationship is abruptly
terminated.

Of course Gary responded to the above in kind, see his blog entry at
Teledyn where he wonders how it is that none of us over on knowledgeboard met
his challenge head-on, even though there are enough metrics to warrant such a
discussion. Why is it that were only attempts to either prove him wrong, as I
tried to do, or to just look away and avoid the whole issue of how trust is not
just a cognitive thing but a physical sensation as well?
The reason that non
of us have reacted to Gary’s neuro-physiological approach, now that I think
about it, might stem from an intuitive (neurophysiological?) drive to block out
anything that points to our more animal-like aspects. And pavlovian responses to
other peoples e.g. subliminal messages is something we probably don’t want to
dwell on for long as it seems to undermine our basic perception of ourselves as
free agents. Or maybe it is just because we are generally ill at ease with the
intangible stuff that goes on in our heads. Maybe this would be something to
explore further. Also, and this is something very different, I see a two-way
approach in responding to what has been said in the threads on trust sofar. One
group of comments takes the self as a starting point and then reflects on what I
can do to enter into trusting relationships. This is also the point of reference
I take. (although I’m pretty much the only one probably that takes trust as
something that’s independent from intrapersonal relationships). The other group
takes the other as a starting point and then asks how can I be sure that he’s
not doublecrossing me, in other words how can I protect myself from
untrustworthy elements. This to me seems the basic divide: how can I foster
trust, vs/and how can I defend myself against misplacing trust. The first starts
of from a generally trusting view of the world, the other from a generally
distrusting view of the world. Thinking along while writing this, I have the
intuitive feeling that this division might be the reason I responded to Gary’s
original comment with an attempt to persuade him to my view, or in other words
to prove him wrong. If that’s the case, than it’s of course no wonder that it
didn’t work 🙂 Thus far the articles from both John Moore,
George Por
and myself
have concentrated on the question how to foster trust, as a person or a
organisation. Anything on how to deal with willful distrustful behaviour by
others has been left untouched. In my article, with hindsight, this was done on
purpose, as I tried to explore what I can do pro-actively. The distrustful view
of the world takes a more reactive stance, as it seems to me, and that is
something I generally try to avoid, as it puts me on the receiving end of any
potential stick almost automatically.