At SIA we say we believe in building trusting relationships with our international partners. So what does that really mean? I read this blog post recently about trust by Ben Ramalingam on his blog Aid on the Edge of Reason about international development and aid. [Thank you to Jennifer Lenter for bringing this post to my attention!]
Ben has some interesting points about the many aspects of trust – how trust is an evolving process, relies on equal exchange, and has many difference ingredients. Ongoing correspondence and a strong relationship with the people he supported were very important for Del and these practices continue to be important criteria as the SIA Board evaluates grant applications.
Ultimately, for me, it is a matter of faith and seeing the God-light in others that I am able to depend on our partners to serve their communities with integrity. Trust is a very important part of what we do and I love seeing how building trust and developing a strong relationship leads to confidence and good works.
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August 19, 2010
For one reason or another, I have been thinking about trust this week. Trust is regularly cited as a critical factor in effective aid organizations, is seen as the essential for partnerships, and creating it is seen as a primary task for aid leadership.
But all too often trust is mentioned as if it can simply be designed, imposed and managed. As a concept, trust is both over-used and poorly understood.
From the viewpoint of aid organizations as complex social processes, and drawing on Chris Rogers’Informal Coalitions approach, trust has three specific features which are overlooked or ignored.
First, trust is a property of relations and interactions. Second, trust is multidimensional. Third, trust is emergent. It’s worth looking at each of these in turn.
1. Trust as a property of relations and interactions
“…people’s sense of trust is embodied – or not – in the unscripted detail of each and every interaction that they have with one another. It is personally and socially constructed – both consciously and subconsciously – in these moments that people come together. As such, it reflects participants’ past history of interactions, their future hopes and expectations about this and/or other important relationships, and the current immediacy of the exchange. At the same time, the emerging outcomes of this ongoing process shift the ways in which ‘the past’ is recalled, ‘the future’ is constructed and the present is lived – all in the here and now.”
2. Trust is multidimensional:
“…we might believe that someone is being genuine and truthful when they say that they intend to do something, and yet still not trust them to do it because we don’t think that they have the necessary competence. The dimensions include:
character (perceived integrity and trustworthiness)…
community (whether the person is recognized as being ‘one of us’, with shared perspectives, common interests and sense of identity)
communication (perceived openness, honesty and straightforwardness);
confidentiality (sense that it is ‘safe’ to share confidences) – “I believe that I can be open with you, without fear of you taking advantage of me or breaching that confidence.”
credibility (whether or not the ‘story’ makes sense and is believable in it’s own right) – “I believe that your ‘story’ (proposition, strategy, system etc) is credible and makes sense in its own right.”
capability (perceived knowledge, skills and abilities in relevant areas) –“I believe that you have the necessary capacity and competence to do what is needed in this situation.”
context (whether the patterns of taken-for-granted cultural assumptions are tending to channel behaviour in ways that enhance or undermine trust) – “I believe that the organizational culture and climate fosters an environment of trust.”
commitments (dependability in keeping agreements and promises) – “I believe that I can depend on you to do what you say you will do.”
3. Trust is Emergent
Complexity science has long been used to understand issues of trust and cooperation. In his now-classic work, noted complexity thinker Robert Axelrod showed how trust can emerge even in situations where there are self-interested actors with no central authority. More generally,
“People derive their sense of trust from the detail of the actions, interactions and transactions that comprise everyday life in the organization. The sense they make of their world, including the feeling of trust (or mistrust) that this evokes, emerges from this ongoing interactional process. Also, the more that a particular ‘sense’ of trust is ‘taken up’ by others, through the diverse interplay of conversations across an organization (or fragments of it), the more generalized it becomes. It is then more likely to be taken up in similar ways by those same people in future – and, potentially, by others with whom they interact… It is the self-organizing process of ‘shared’ meaning-making, through which patterns of assumptions emerge and become taken-for-granted over time. These patterns create expectancy and tend to channel ongoing sensemaking, imperceptibly, down familiar ‘pathways’. Since this patterning process is self-organizing, it means that trust cannot be ‘designed and built’ by managers, as part of a structured ‘culture change programme’. However, a major influence on this ongoing sensemaking and action-taking is people’s observation of the behaviours of those in formal leadership positions – throughout the organization.”
These different properties of trust may be essential to understand if we are serious about furthering aid efforts. For example, in aid reform processes, trust is repeatedly highlighted as one of the enduring challenges facing progress. On the development side, the Paris Declaration advocates for harmonisation between donors and mutual accountability with national governments; on the humanitarian side, the Cluster approach seeks to coordinate international relief efforts by bring the NGOs together in UN-led, sector-specific networks. Both approaches have been stymied by, among other things, a lack of trust between diverse actors.
The central take-away from the above should be that trust is not some box to be ticked in order to achieve aid success. Trust takes time, effort, presence, engagement, commitment and humility. Trust means putting a human face on overtly technical endeavours. Trust means starting something without necessarily knowing how it is going to end. Creating the space for trust in aid may mean re-casting aid as being primarily about relationships, as Ros Eyben and others have argued, and seeing what might emerge as a result.
Scary, eh?
FOOTNOTE: All of this makes the recent revelation in the Economist all the more intriguing. New research seems to indicate that just having a dog around can boost human cooperation levels—potentially altering well known game theory results.
“….The researchers explored how the presence of an animal altered players’ behaviour in a game known as the prisoner’s dilemma…Having a dog around made volunteers 30% less likely to snitch than those who played without one.”
So, should the next Paris Declaration meeting have canine observers?
Praying together and sharing ideas helps build trust between group members.
