#WorkingOutLoud on the Landscape and Taxonomy of Trust

Sharing some sketches as i refine my thinking on the emerging Landscape of Trust, and introduce the second element, the taxonomy, the levels of trust. My current thinking is to map the landscape, through a series of survey and narrative exercises, to provide a space that captures the subjective elements that people associate with trust, and any correlated relationships between them (e.g. the relationship between ‘trust’ and ‘reward’). On top of this, i think there are levels of trust, which i am currently mapping from ‘no trust’ through to ‘blind trust’. All of this may evolve.

Once complete, i hope to be able to baseline any organisation or team against a broad data set, with cultural, sector and regional variants. With the baseline, and an understanding of the invested levels of trust, this should provide indicators of development areas: e.g. if ‘reward’ is flagged as having no trust, whilst Leadership has high invested trust, we can consider change accordingly.

Specifically, this is not intended to be a ‘trust score’, but rather a heat map, indicating areas that are out of alignment. Nor is it intended to be a mechanistic ‘pull this lever to build trust’ exercise: it is, instead, an exploration of nested subjective notions of trust, and an attempt to put a pragmatic and fair framework around it, to allow us to take practical steps to both reflect upon and earn greater trust within an organisation.