Trust in Motion
September 25th, 2009 Carl Bate Tags: Connected World, social media, The Future!, trust
Posted in CIO Agenda, Firm of the Future, Strategy & Innovation, Trends |
Trust has been a word used quite a lot recently. First we had the lack of trust in the global financial system. Now in the UK we have a lack of trust in politicians and their expenses. Stephen M. R. Covey has recently written an excellent book all about it called ‘The Speed of Trust – the one thing that changes everything’.
In the perfect storm with trust, recent events have also put the spotlight firmly on agility again, and the ability to react to events and more to the point unanticipated events has moved back up the most-pressing chart of the chief officer top ten.
Agility is one of those wonderful words where one can spend the first part of any conversation simply discussing what it means to the organisation before even getting on to how one might achieve it. Speed to market? Speed of reaction? Foresight? Adaptability? Ability to change the rules of the game yourself? Often in these situations it can be helpful to get the dictionary out, and for the purpose of the post I’d like to go with agility as being ‘quickness of motion’. But how to achieve it?
In many cultures we have a tendency to convey machine like qualities on our large-scale structures and institutions (the machinery of government, the levers of the organisation, changing up a gear etc) – and agility as a characteristic of an organisation does not escape unscathed from such a mechanistic perspective.
Often, the human aspects that can deliver quickness of motion are placed secondary to the mechanistic aspects. And where agility is concerned the executive agenda will often tend towards focusing on more complex rules for dynamic processes as opposed to human collaboration.
So where do trust and agility meet?
There are quite a few formulae for trust. I happen to like the one I came across at Gemini Consulting about 10 years ago which goes along the lines of:
Trust = (intimacy * credibility) / risk. This provides a helpful perspective on the mass of trust relationships between businesses and customers, staff in different business units, governments and citizens and of course our social networks.
If one looks at the social networks of the business – the social-enterprise – in contrast to the typical control organisational view, not only may you discover what’s really going on but you’ll also see the dynamic enterprise trust networks in action. It’s in the enterprise social networks where trust and agility live the most.
In unusual situations – times of increased risk – we tend to rely more than ever on the people we know most to get things done. If we want to be agile, engaging networks through the right trust relationships is going to win-out over engaging through the wrong ones.
But there is a twist here. As Richard Foster writes in his book ‘Innovation: The Attacker’s Advantage’, rare indeed is the organisation which relentlessly abandons the products, services and skills that have brought it success. And rarer still the individual. Advantage goes to the new attacker without the legacy. Or to put it in perhaps the most famous way of all – we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
When we really need to react fast – to have quickness of motion – perhaps it is more in the speed of establishing trust between new people, new networks and new cultures where the agility is really going to come from.
Perhaps it is in the question – ‘how can I help the people in my business to form new trust networks?’ – where a management focus might lie for agility in the connected age over the more known (and ironically enough, trusted) approaches of looking for agility in the processes.
The business case to embrace mass-collaboration – or to borrow a phrase from a new acquaintance yesterday ‘to unleash Web 2.0 in the enterprise’ – is starting to look pretty compelling on a number of fronts, not least of which is a step toward speed of trust.
Carl Bate is a Partner at Atos Consulting where he leads its Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Next Practice Advisory practice. Carl is an advisor to business and government, and working with people from different professional perspectives, works to solve some of the complex problems organisations face in the connected world by applying 'next' not just 'best' practices.
Carl has cross-industry and cross-geography experience and has served as an advisor and line executive across many organisations. Carl has served clients as an advisor in cross-border policing, global energy, global financial services, global hi-tech, global law, global logistics, global media, global pharmaceutical, UK financial services, UK retail, UK services, and UK Government, including the Cabinet Office, Home Office and UK Criminal Justice System. A British Computer Society Fellow, formerly Chair of the BCS Futures Group, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for Capgemini UK & Ireland and Head of its Technology Consulting Group, Carl has a track-record in helping organisations address long-standing issues and embrace new opportunities.
Carl is co-author of ‘Lost in Translation – a handbook for information systems in the 21st century’. Published in 2007, it is a best-selling management book about 5 words which describe how organisations behave in the connected world, and which help ‘business’ and ‘IT’ speak a common language. This Systems thinking framework, VPEC-T, is being adopted as a way to aid analysis of complex business and societal situations – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VPEC-T
Carl is a guest speaker on the Boston University MBA Programme for CIOs.
I agree that the formula is interesting and I think it captures Trust in an easily understood way. Further, taking Dominique’s example of the postal service, I think it proves the formula rather than detracts.
I have a medium level of trust of the post: High intimacy (due to the numerous cultural references and longevity of the organisation – it is also tangible as the product is physically expressed) * medium credibility (as we hear many stories and tales of woe about post being lost, dumped or burnt by the postie because he doesn’t have time to deliver it all – plus the levels of junk post prevents us valuing the postal service) / medium risk (as we are adapting and have a lower reliance on postal mail)
-> Medium = High * medium
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medium
Trust is an interesting concept that seems to be forgotten/ignored too often in our day-to-day working practices. How do we trust our syems to deliver? What about our colleagues? Now consider the implication of trust in terms of a knowledge management system or Intranet. Then, in our communications with our customers and suppliers.
We need to include much meta-data to our communications in order to provide the means to communicate trustworthiness. What needs to be captured to ensure we communicate in a trustwothy way and preventing false or unwarranted trust?
* Identity of contributor(s) (with any references by indivuals or organiations)
* Date (and time?) of posting
* Sources
* Version and reviewer’s identity?
Carl asks ‘how can I help the people in my business to form new trust networks?’ Well I suggest we need to remember to capture and provide the evidence. Where internal systems do not communicate ‘trustworthiness’, this needs to change.
I find the formula « Trust = (intimacy * credibility) / risk” interesting. I don’t fully agree with it, but definitively I consider it interesting because there are the items, but probably different equation, depending on the nature of the relation.
For example, we can have a high level of trust in the mail, recognized by law (registered mail), but the level of intimacy is not that high.