What *is* trust?

Last week was the first Bara Brith Camp. We had a great opener from Dyfrig about trust within organisations, based on the work of Professor Searle.  I love a good bit of dialectic because it makes me think, and I've certainly been thinking far more about trust since Dyfrig blogged about it and I blogged back.

I'll be honest, I lost track of Dyfrig's talk for a while when he said we "trust people like ourselves". That stopped me in my tracks because my instinct was to say that's not true. I may warm more towards people like myself. But trust?

Maybe my instinct just reveals a worrying distrust of myself and therefore anyone like me! But I think it runs deeper than that.

You see, in Barod, we are about as different from each other as you can imagine. We look different, we talk differently, we have different life experiences, different ways of thinking, different working styles, different priorities - and radically different beliefs about fundamental things like the meaning of life.

And yet these are the guys I've set up in business with. We've gone through a lot together. We trust each other at a profound level. We've had to trust each other deeply and riskily.

So I'm left pondering about who we trust and why. And rather than wait to come to a nice neat conclusion, I thought I'd inflict my ramblings on you.

• How much of what we commonly call 'trust' is more about being in a comfort zone of the familiar? That warm feeling towards people we like? I never trust comfort zones - at least not when the world needs changing. If trust is based on this, then it's not what we need for radical transformation.

• If we conflate 'trust' and 'people like ourselves' we end up with the Old Boys Network. After all, if we accept that we need trust in order to run organisations and countries, then if we trust those like ourselves of course we will preferentially recruit from people with the same backgrounds and life experiences. Bye-bye social mobility and social justice.

• What if trust wasn't about 'people like ourselves' but about 'sharing a vision'. We trust because we share a vision for a different Wales - and we've all put in enough and taken enough risks that we know, we trust, each of us is serious in sharing that vision. The basis for our trusting each other is that we have all regularly acted against our self-interest for the sake of the shared vision.

• What if we trust precisely because we are different, and our diversity is essential to achieving the shared vision? I think that's where our trust comes from in Barod. We believe each of us brings unique value precisely because we are so different from each other. And I get to exercise trust every time I accept I cannot understand or do something, but another worker in Barod can. A bit like muscles, trust grows as it is used.

So - two versions of trust.

• Trust because we are similar.
• Trust because we share a vision, and know we need each other's differentness to achieve the vision.

The 'similar/diversity' got me thinking about Agile and Traditional. Bear with me, as I haven't fully thought this out yet.

• Agile relies on small diverse teams.
• Traditional relies on silos of similarity with a tier of (similar) managers joining the silos together.
• Public services regularly talk about the need to break down silos.
• Any well-functioning organisation relies on trust.
• Organisational research on trust thinks about people trusting each other "because we similar'.

I wonder, I just wonder, whether it is so hard for public services to break out of silo thinking because people within them "trust people like ourselves".

If so, and I appreciate it is a big "if", might this mean we can break out of silos by redefining trust? Can we teach and encourage people to trust each other on the basis of a shared vision and acceptance that we need each other's differences to achieve the vision?

Back to you, Dyfrig!