2010: The Summer of Trust

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In the press, CNBC hosted a distinguished panel of experts on the subject of restoring trust in business and markets.And Forbes produced a 19-article special on trust.

HBR's special edition was there a year before, and BusinessWeek declared The Great Trust Offensive to be the new high ground way back in fall '09).

Tower of Babel

Trying to make sense of all the above is daunting. What other subject matter is eclectic enough to merit press coverage on issues from leadership to economics to psychology to politics to marketing? Some of this is due to the sheer cantankerous mess of the word itself. Our casual use of the word "trust" fails to distinguish between a noun ("trust is down"), a verb ("trust me"), and an adjectival phrase ("politicians are less trusted than lawyers").

This is not a trivial issue of semantics. We use the same word for long-term social belief systems (e.g. "democracy works") that we use for feelings that follow economic cycles (e.g. "I trust the President"). Beneath this definitional difficulty lurks real confusion about social policy. If trust in government is down, does that mean that people are less trusting? Or that government is becoming less trustworthy? Ditto for the SEC, the local school system, and the mass media. Is the problem that we trust less, or that people, policies, and institutions have genuinely become less worthy of our trust?

If indeed the bigger issue is trustworthiness, we need to look to codes of conduct, approaches to governance and regulation, and misaligned goals and incentives. If the issue is that as a people we have become less and less inclined to trust, then scholars would tell us the root issues are such things as economic disparity, the perceived inability to better one's life, and a generalized sense of good or ill will on the part of others. Intelligent policy discussions can't be held if we don't cultivate the data, even the language, to make such simple distinctions.

We sometimes forget a simple fact about trust: It's about relationships. There has been an explosion in the number of relationships we all maintain. Fragmented business models (think outsourcing) have increased the number of relationships we maintain with customers, suppliers, new and old co-workers, and industry contacts. These new relationships are hyper-fueled by the growth in new social media (Twitter, LinkedIn, FaceBook, blogs, and e-mail), in turn supported by faster Internet speed and lower costs. Just imagine how many people you interact with daily, as compared with the number 10 years ago.

Given the growth in our interactivity, we are in many ways far more trusting than we were just 10 years ago—in the amount of information we share online and the number of people we share it with. A higher number of untrustworthy interactions is compatible with a lower rate of untrustworthy interactions. So is trust up or down? Perhaps both.

Where the Weak Links Lie

Nonetheless, surveys saying "trust is down" are almost certainly saying something meaningful. And three sectors are most at risk of becoming the Newark and Detroit of this Summer of Trust. They are government, business, and the press.

The Shirley Sherrod case was a frightening example of trust breakdown for government and media. Just as with the recent financial meltdown, it became apparent that an infection in one part of the system was immediately reflected in another. Everyone—from mainstream news to bloggers to politicians—immediately bought a story that was presented horribly out of context.

The CNBC panel discussion showed the dysfunction at the junction of media and business. A panel of distinguished experts, summoned to talk about "restoring trust in business, the markets, and government," found they couldn't agree on much other than the need for tax cuts, a politician-like response to a critical social question stated, yet unenforced, by the media.

All three sectors—politics, business, media—are suffering from a rapid replacement of relationships by transactions. When time is short, feedback is instant, and attention spans are measured in nanoseconds, we get daily sound bites expressed at high decibel levels around issues that cry our for longer, thoughtful, collaborative discussion.

As the world of business becomes more and more interdependent and tightly connected, the implications for trust are twofold. On the one hand, the need to interact smoothly may be the major force driving us to increased trust relationships.

On the other hand, if those relationships are made up solely of low-trust, short-term, market-based transactions, the same need for interdependence will put us at greater risk of Black Swan events, thus threatening systemwide trust. We need to figure out how to integrate long-term relationships and shared goals with business models that link multiple organizations.

Charles H. Green is founder of TrustedAdvisor Associates and the co-author of The Trusted Advisor (Simon & Schuster, 2000). He is a 1976 graduate of Harvard Business School.

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