Lucid trust.
Lucid trust is an analytical and strategic framework for understanding, guiding and transforming organizations that operate under high uncertainty.
The map is not the territory
The map is not the territory.
Alfred Korzybski · 1933
Drawing on moral philosophy, complex systems theory, applied ethics and institutional management, we address the central challenge of leadership today: the distance between the plan and reality, which can never be fully closed.
Every organization tries to find its way with a map: its purpose, its strategic plan, its metrics and its reports. In dynamic, interconnected environments, however, the map never fully matches the territory. That gap cannot be removed, and it is where trust operates and is tested.
Faced with the uncertainty this distance creates, organizations tend to drift into one of two pathologies:
In blind trust, the organization mistakes the map for reality. It stops questioning its assumptions, silences warnings from its environment and loses its ability to learn and adapt.
In total distrust, the organization rejects every map. Paralyzed by paranoia or stifled by excessive control, it destroys collective intelligence and loses its ability to act.
Lucid trust is the third way: a higher ethical and strategic competence. It makes it possible to work with a map that is always under construction, recognizing its limits without evading reality, while keeping the resolve to decide, coordinate and act with impact.
Trust
Trust is the fundamental energy on which every human organization and relationship depends. It is hard to analyze and to evaluate, and harder still to act on directly. In fact, an intervention that tries to force trust without changing the conditions that make it possible usually weakens it.
For that reason our method does not measure trust as if it were an abstract dogma. It evaluates and strengthens the systemic conditions of trust. Lucid trust keeps the ability to examine what it trusts: it recognizes that the relationship or the system may fail, it pays attention to signals that contradict its assumptions and it always keeps its judgment open.
What trust is
Trust is like a living system
Trust is more like a plant, or like life unfolding, than a trophy or a precious stone, because it cannot be manufactured or frozen in place. It emerges when it finds favorable conditions, and it usually takes richer and more unexpected forms than those anyone planned.
Impact
Impact is the sustained change an organization produces in the lives and circumstances of the people, communities, environment or systems it works with. It cannot be reduced to activities, the people served, a product or a service.
Measuring impact can reduce it to reports or figures and leave out the change it produces or could produce. For that reason impact calls for an integrated reading that works with metrics without being reduced to them.
The starting point is clarity about the change sought, the problem addressed and the purpose. On that basis we build the theory of change and the indicators suited to each case.
Modes of trust
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- We trust without evaluating.
- Loyalty replaces judgment.
- Criticism feels like betrayal.
- Conflict is avoided.
- Warning signals are silenced.
- The crisis builds quietly until it erupts.
- Processes become transparent.
- Decisions are supported with reasons.
- The relationship is structured by recognition of the other, respect, limits and collaboration.
- Words and actions match.
- Purpose guides decisions, and there is a plan.
- Criticism is treated as nourishing, is sought out and leads to change.
- Mistakes and crises become shared learning.
- We trust no one.
- Every signal is read as a threat.
- Coordination becomes impossible, and processes become endless and costly.
- Relationships are reduced to control.
- Learning stops.
- The organization fragments.
Blind trust
Total distrust
Lucid trust
Blind trust and total distrust both leave the organization blind, by opposite routes.
The book
Lucid Trust
José Andrés Murillo · Uqbar Editores, 2012
A study in social philosophy and trust