What Could We Imagine? Trusted Relationships in a Diverse and Pluralistic Society
By: Amy Baker Mcisaac
Tags: Philanthropy, Civic Engagement, Pace Imagination, Democracy, Trust

Many will describe 2020 as the year that upended “business as usual,” and while that can be a daunting reality filled with uncertainty, instability, and ambiguity for the road ahead, PACE wondered… could this also present an opportunity to make the impossible possible? Could the chaos of 2020 also be a chance to imagine a new and improved future state — however we define that?

When PACE set out to deploy imagination through a series of Imagination Sprints, we knew we needed to select topics and issues that were urgent enough to respond to the challenges and events of 2020, broad enough to apply to multiple facets of civic life, and narrow enough to promote productive imagination.

Trust — and in particular, the ways we trust people different from us — was a topic at the top of our list for a few reasons. First, we know the trends. Sixty percent of U.S. adults under 30 say most people “can’t be trusted.” Sixty-four percent of adults think Americans trust in each other has been shrinking. Seventy percent of adults believe Americans’ low trust makes it harder to solve problems. Many of the indicators we track tell us that trust is not going in a positive direction. Second, we know how important trusted relationships are to strong communities and a strong democracy — and that’s just person-to-person trust, which does not even account for public trust of institutions or in the legitimacy of democratic processes. Most (arguably, all) of the components of civic engagement and strong democracies rely on engaging with people you likely don’t know (or don’t know well). Trust is the currency we trade in, and without it, our very system of self-governance is threatened. Lastly, we know trust is on the minds of funders and philanthropy. In a March 2020 meeting of PACE Members, exploring trust was the top request for where PACE focuses efforts, and this theme carried through even our most recent Member Meeting in December 2020. Trust has been front and center in national conversations this year, with many groups explicitly exploring it. We felt we could uniquely contribute by deploying imagination into these efforts.

In September 2020, PACE hosted an Imagination Sprint focused on imagining trusted relationships in a diverse and pluralistic society. The sprint engaged sixteen participants with diverse backgrounds spanning philanthropy, academia, leadership development, DEI, technology, nonprofits, civic science, and the arts. Together, we engaged in a series of exercises designed to do three things:

identify assumptions we carry about trust, which helps us break down the current frame that may not be serving us in our new reality; spark insights about trust, which helps us build new scaffolding upon which we can envision a new reality; and create the conditions for kernels of new ideas about trust to sprout.

For example, one of the exercises we did prompted the group to explore how we might help strangers build trust in different scenarios, which encouraged us to “try on” different situations when trust is needed as a way of accessing deeper truths about trust. Groups spent time working through how we might help strangers build trust more quickly in online spaces, given that we’re unsure who is real and who might be bot; how we might build capacity for increasing trust in strangers for urban/rural residents, knowing that cooperation across groups is becoming more critical for stabilizing our communities; and how we might help strangers who share a physical community build trust, given that trust can stem from unplanned interactions and we are social distancing. Each scenario in this exercise — and all of the sprint’s exercises — prompted discussion that surfaced important assumptions and identified useful insights for the imagination process.

Uncovered Assumptions and Insights about Trust

By way of further sharing what imagination transpired during our time together, I want to provide a glimpse into the assumptions and insights about trust that were revealed to us through our process. While these points are not exhaustive of all the conversations or angles we touched on, I consider them the “greatest hits” as I reflect back on the sprint.

A very common theme was that people experience trust differently, and we should be careful to not make assumptions about the value someone might place on trust or how easy it might be for someone to trust a stranger, community, or system. As one participant shared “…there are a lot of different dimensions to it and a lot of different perspectives to consider, so it needs to be approached carefully and patiently.” This became even more true when considering the ways people with different racial backgrounds experience trust. In fact, one of our sprint sessions occurred the day after charges (or lack thereof) were announced in the Breonna Taylor case, which spurred a conversation further underlining the racial disparities in trust.

The group kept coming back to a concept of “levels of trust” — that trust operates on different planes which often interact with each other. For many of the exercises, we made the design choice to focus on trusting strangers, as it provided a shared path to enter the topic for all participants. Very quickly, it became difficult to imagine at the individual level without taking systemic and structural considerations into account. For example, when you decide to answer a knock at your door from a stranger, at some level, you are also trusting the systems of law enforcement that are intended to protect you if that interaction becomes dangerous to your safety. (And it’s important to note the complicated nature of this for certain communities, particularly Black communities, which we discussed as a group). Or, when you decide to put your trust in a candidate by voting for them in an election, at some level, you are also trusting the election process and our system of government. A major insight for our group was how tightly woven personal trust and structural trust are to each other, leaving us to wonder: is there a way to make the personal structural and the structural personal? What does building a culture of trust look like? Furthermore, participants noted that all institutions are run by people, so perhaps building trust with institutions relies on building trust with individuals?

As a group, we spent a lot of time exploring how trust is built. Our thinking: if we can understand how we experience trust personally, perhaps we can gain insights into how we can scale it for ourselves, our communities, and for others. Here are the areas our exploration took us:

We interrogated the transitive properties of trust, and the ways that connections (like a warm introduction from a friend), ratings (like a five-star rating on Airbnb), and symbols (like a uniform) reduce the risk of trusting new people, especially ones we might perceive as different from us.

That said, we also grew to appreciate the effort needed to build trust. As one participant shared “Trust must be earned; it requires proactive effort.”

We touched a bit on the idea of incentives — do people need incentives to trust outside their comfort zones? Which incentives work?

Perhaps our most interesting conversations about how trust is built had us considering the difference between interactions and relationships. Presumably, a first encounter with a stranger would be called an interaction. But when does a series of interactions become a relationship? And when does a stranger become something else — an acquaintance, a neighbor, a friend? What are the indicators that help us know those lines? Airbnb’s Co-Founder, Joe Gebbia, says “Strangers are friends waiting to be discovered.” Is that true? Do language and mindset play a bigger role here than we thought?

Related, one of the provocations that has stuck with me the most was from a participant who was reflecting on the biases and assumptions that we all carry — often unconsciously — about people, especially those different from us. When we meet a stranger, we pick up on physical attributes, cultural signals, and socio-economic indicators. Without conscious thought, our brains assess risk and safety faster than we can say hello. Our minds flood with preconceived notions, making the stranger in front of us already a person in our minds. The participant concluded by sharing, “Maybe we have never truly met a stranger in our whole lives.” In some ways, this could present a great asset for building trust, but that all depends on what the preconceived notions are that flood our minds.

Lastly, a participant noted that in almost all of the exercises, we were working through situations where trust is needed. “Needed” is the operative word. Trust only emerges because someone has a need they cannot meet themselves. There is a gap — big or small, perceived or real, urgent or patient — and we need to trust someone enough to help us fill it. As one participant reflected, “It’s easier for me to remember times when I was the stranger needing help than when I was the stranger that helped.” With humble recognition that no one is fully independent and everyone relies on others to some degree, an insight emerged: trust is a practice. It’s not a “thing” that we either inherently have or don’t have or that has limited supply. It’s something we can strengthen by being honest about our needs and the needs of people around us. In this way, we can practice extending trust to others in almost limitless ways throughout our day, and inversely, there are almost limitless opportunities to practice being trust-worthy as well. It was a very encouraging insight to uncover.

Kernels of New Ideas About Trust

From those assumptions and insights, these kernels of ideas emerged:

A few of the participants came from higher education, and our exploration of trust sometimes navigated into conversations about how BIPOC students, specifically, experience trust on campus. Participants noted that the lack of trust BIPOC students feel with their universities often pushes them to use lists of demands and social media platforms to express the racism and trauma they experience. One participant sketched out an alternative, loosely called the Equity Performance Leadership Framework, which would provide an avenue for students and university leaders to collaborate in de-centering whiteness and instead, build trust with BIPOC students by creating new systems and policies that involve ways BIPOC students wish to be centered and involved in campus life.

Our Imagination Sprint timed during the Presidential election season, and notably, the debates were occurring in parallel to our sessions. Many participants came into the sessions wondering about the ways we put or are asked to put trust into candidates, who — despite the 24/7 news cycle and ever-constant social media presence — are technically strangers to us. An idea started to sprout about designing better debates, and maybe not debates at all. Is there a better way to “showcase” a candidate’s values, personality, and temperament while also gaining a deeper understanding of his/her policy positions? Would that help us build the necessary trust in candidates that would motivate us to vote for them, or better yet, inspire us to follow their leadership while in office? Participants sketched out “Candidate Design Challenge,” which would provide a window into candidates’ analytical capabilities, problem-solving creativity, and collaboration skills; “Collaborative Candidate Forum,” which would engage candidates in non-zero-sum problem solving exercises that require them to show how they can work with others to propose meaningful solutions to non-routine problems; and “Better Debates,” which would design debate rules to reward candidates for their active listening skills.

Similarly, our Imagination Sprint occurred while COVID-19 was on the rise in the United States, and our explorations of trust were amplified when put in the context of crisis. In crisis, needs often emerge with little notice, occur on a large scale, and threaten our most basic needs (safety, food, shelter, etc). There are fewer examples of trust as critical as when someone is in immediate crisis, which also means those are important times for “the helpers” to trust enough to provide assistance. Participants sketched out a few ideas to expand on this, including: “Calling All Neighbors!” a contact list of nearby (vetted) people who have specific skills and want to help in a crisis; “Match Made in Crisis,” a way for medical professionals to open their social network to other crisis experts with complementary skill sets so when crisis hits, they have a trusted circle of professionals they can mobilize to respond; and “Transitive Trust,” a way for first responders to recruit their trusted networks to work with them during a crisis (“If responder trusts person A who trusts person B, then A can also trust B, and their entire networks are more able to trust each other. It’s an exponentially expanding network of trust and support!”)

Our group explored the symbolisms of trust that make trust easier to build, and we looked at uniforms as an example of that. In a way, uniforms are short-hand for trust (think: police officers, paramedics, clergy), but they can also be complicated and do not always represent trust to everyone (think: police officers, paramedics, clergy). Participants sketched out new ideas for ways uniforms might symbolize trust, such as: “Helper Uniforms,” a way to easily identify the helpers in a community that remove the anxiety or stress that traditional uniforms may cause for people; “Designing Together,” a collaborative process for people to come together to fashion uniforms that are truly reflective of the worker on the job and the people meant to experience that work. This idea was particularly interesting given a revealed insight that the very act of co-creation deepens trust. As one participant said, “When you make things together, you have to create, which is an act of hope. You have to test, which is an act of resilience. You have to disagree, which is an act of civic discourse. You eventually have to find a solution, which is an act of give and take.”

Areas for Further Exploration

Even going through our recordings, virtual white boards, and notes from our sessions had me relive the richness of the discussion and the imagination. There were so many “ah-ha” moments that deepened our collective understanding of trust and helped us see where further exploration and imagination could be helpful, such as:

The way diversity impacts trust; what can we learn about the how the differences between people make trust harder or easier to build?

The ways that leaders might encourage more trust-building in their communities; how can leaders earn trust and then leverage it to build trust with others?

The “bad actors” in trust-building; how is trust in individuals or institutions compromised by people who are intentionally gaming the system with ill-intent?

The impact of broken trust; how do you repair trust after it has been broken?

The creative process of imagination as a mechanism to build trust; could imagination be a tool for addressing some of the distrust that already exists between people and groups?

So what do we do from here? The Imagination Sprint was intended to “get the juices flowing” related to trust, and it certainly achieved that — both for us at PACE and the participants of the sprints. We now have a keener sense of the topic, the opportunities, and the gaps that might be worth interrogating further. In particular, the process of breaking down assumptions and sparking new insights about trust allowed us to start to build new scaffolding upon which we can imagine a new reality for us as individuals, for our communities, and for our country. And, we have a strong community of participants who are thinking deeply on the topic and how it might shape their work moving forward.

PACE will continue to run its Imagination Sprint series into 2021, while also considering the ways it can further explore this topic of trust with philanthropy. Until then, we will ruminate on the concluding provocation from one of our participants: “My biggest takeaway is that there are a lot of small things we could do that would make a significant difference with the big thing of trust.”

To learn more about PACE’s Imagination Sprints, please visit: www.PACEFunders.org/imagine.