Developing a Prototype Trust Diagnostic

The ‘Landscape of Trust’ research has three aims: to build an evidence base behind the language around ‘trust’, to build diagnostics, visualisations, and frameworks to understand how trust flows at all levels within systems, and to prototype and grounded developmental frameworks for ‘what we can do about it’. Whilst the research itself is still early stage, i want to start work to explore potential diagnostic and visualisation approaches, with a view to prototyping them rapidly, across the rest of this year. With that in mind, i’m sharing an initial design today, and will continue to #WorkOutLoud as i build it out. I have several organisations willing to prototype.

The Landscape of Trust research is grounded in stories: gathering narrative accounts of ‘what trust means to me’, and other questions around failure, flow, and type. We can plot these words onto a landscape. My hypothesis is that we will each inhabit different spaces: areas of commonality, highways and byways, but we also occupy outlier spaces. In the critical discourse analysis, we group the words into clusters, so either through direct choice of words, or by asking questions around the clusters, we should be able, at a rudimentary level, to characterise the individual landscape.

Furthermore, we should be able to plot it individually, and aggregate to the group, so that we can baseline individually against group, group against group, and group against external baselines e.g. Geographical, age, culture etc.

With a map of trust within a group, we should be able to generate narrative based on how my map relates to yours, which would allow more of an App based tool to emerge, linking into wider developmental and visualisation frameworks.

This is early stage work. I am clear that trust is multi layered, contextual, fluid, so a diagnostic is only really able to snapshot aspects of the moment, but that may be enough. One thing i know for sure: if we build evidence, share it openly, learn clearly, prototype and adapt, we may at least get to a grounded, useful, usable, tool set.