Lucid Trust is an analytical and strategic framework for understanding, orienting and transforming organizations that navigate scenarios of high uncertainty.
The map is not the territory.
Alfred Korzybski · 1933
Drawing together moral philosophy, the theory of complex systems, applied ethics and institutional management, we take on the central challenge of all contemporary leadership: the unbridgeable distance between the blueprint and reality.
Every organization tries to orient itself with a map: its purpose, its strategic planning, its metrics and its reports. In dynamic and interconnected environments, however, the map never coincides completely with the territory. It is precisely in that constitutive gap that trust operates and is put to the test.
Faced with the uncertainty of this distance, organizations tend to fall into two pathological drifts:
In Blind Trust, the organization confuses the map with reality. It stops questioning its assumptions, silences the warnings coming from its environment and loses the capacity to learn and adapt.
In Total Distrust, the organization invalidates any map. Paralyzed by paranoia or suffocated by hypercontrol, it destroys collective intelligence and loses the capacity to act.
Lucid Trust is the third way: a higher ethical and strategic competence that makes it possible to sustain a map under permanent construction —recognizing its limits without evading reality— and at the same time to keep the firmness to decide, coordinate and act with impact.
Trust is the fundamental energy that every human organization and relationship depends on. It is a concept that is hard to analyze, hard to evaluate and harder still to intervene in directly. In fact, an intervention that tries to force trust without transforming the conditions that make it possible generally weakens it.
For that reason our method does not measure trust as an abstract dogma, but evaluates and strengthens its systemic conditions. Lucid Trust keeps the capacity to examine what is being trusted: it recognizes that the relationship or the system can fail, it attends to the signals that contradict its assumptions and it always keeps judgment open.
Trust resembles a plant or the unfolding of life more than a trophy or a precious stone, because it is neither manufactured nor frozen, but emerges when it finds favorable conditions, and it usually shows itself in forms richer and more unexpected than the ones planned.
Impact is the sustained change an organization produces in the reality of the people, the communities, the environment or the systems it works with. It is not reduced to activities, to the people served, to a product or to a service.
Measuring impact can reduce it to reports or figures and leave out the change it produces or could produce. It therefore requires an integrated reading that engages with the metrics without being reduced to them.
The starting point is clarity about the change being sought, the problem being addressed and the purpose. From there the theory of change and the indicators suited to each case are built.
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Three poles
Blind trust and total distrust produce organizational blindness by opposite routes.
Lucid Trust
José Andrés Murillo · Uqbar Editores, 2012
A study in social philosophy and trust