From “who do you trust?” to “how do you trust yourself?” – a ‘trust & power’ synopsis

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We feel the need to be able to ‘trust’ the people we work or collaborate with to feel safe to grow and learn and succeed. One presentation at Berlin Change Days 2017, whose theme was ‘Power & Trust’, gave eight ‘pillars of trust’: honesty, reliability, transparency, clarity, credibility, fairness, keeping promises and respect. But the relationship of trust to power is complicated.

In 2017 a majority of citizens of the USA entrusted Donald Trump – a man who consistently and audaciously defies all eight pillars of trust – to rule their country, still the most powerful nation on earth. He was elected not because he is honest, reliable, transparent, clear, credible, fair, keeps promises and is respectful, but because he told people what they want to believe, and promised them what they want to have:
that they’re losing because the system’s rigged and everyone else is cheating;
that the outside world is full of dangerous enemies;
that he can make America safe again;
that he can make America great again.

Every con artist knows that the more you desire something – whether it’s methamphetamine or a pipe dream – the less you need the eight pillars of trust to believe in someone or something. The four balls that a con artist juggles are a knowledge of your desire/fear (desire and fear are flip sides of the same coin), a knowledge of the urgency of that desire/fear, an ability to win your trust, and a willingness to exploit you. Catholic confessionals, Facebook, and the rollout of China’s Social Credit System all have one thing in common: people will trade their trust for enough of what will quell their fears and stoke their hopes. We’re willing to buy entrance into the Kingdom of God, social connection, or public status by entrusting our personal data on our relationships, our networks, our purchases, our locations, our ideas, our questions, our convictions, our addictions, our perversions, our sorrows, our hopes and our dreams. From priests and gurus flogging heaven and enlightenment, to slick salespeople selling the cure-all pill, to politicians from the Kremlin to Capitol Hill, to get-rich-quick schemers to weight loss dreamers to leadership beamers; there’s people who know how to play our vulnerabilities by offering a quick fix for the discomfort that lies there.

This prey of power on trust is nothing new. We can all be predatory, and we can all be vulnerable; we’re all, after all, deeply and blessedly human. As Julie Diamond writes in How to Build Trust: Break It First, “No one is ever fully trustworthy… being fully trustworthy is not possible… There are a million reasons why, in any given moment, our behavior undermines our trustworthiness.”  So the question ‘Who do you trust?’ is really not that useful. You can trust anyone at least a little, and you can trust no one absolutely. A more useful question is ‘How do you trust?’.

Adame Kahane has been called in to set up collaborations in conflict zones from apartheid South Africa to the civil and drug wars of Colombia. His new book, entitled ‘Collaborating With the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don’t Agree with or Like or Trust’, is dedicated “To my enemies and teachers.”  Kahane argues that the rules of conventional collaboration – harmonious communication, shared goals, common purpose, trust – no longer apply in a VUCA world. He proposes ‘Stretch Collaboration’ for situations where participants not only disagree on what the solution is but even on what the problem is. In these situations increased connection also increases the possibility for increased conflict. “when we are in complex, uncontrolled situations, where our perspectives and interests are at odds, we need to search out and work with our conflicts as well as our connections. We need to fight as well as talk.” By stretching beyond the assumptions of conventional collaboration Kahane has seen participants collaborate “without having a single focus or goal… without having a single vision or road map… without being able to change what others were doing.” Kahane has seen Stretch Collaboration succeed in situations in which there is no trust.

Trust is beautiful; the tether of all relationships, it’s a fundamental human need to trust and be trusted. For this very reason trust also becomes a lever for power.  We trust too much, and become untrustworthy ourselves, precisely where we have urgent and unmet needs, holes that need to be filled. We need someone or something to fulfil the part of ourselves that we can’t fulfil ourselves, and this can make us vulnerable and manipulative. The response to the question of ‘how do you trust?’ can only be ‘how do you trust yourself?’. We learn to trust ourselves by soldiering into the swamplands of our ‘beautiful need’ and for this transformative journey we need to be as courageous as warriors.

 

Contact Improv

How Do You Trust? (Power & Trust Pt 2)

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From ‘Who Do You Trust?’ to ‘How Do You Trust?’

Trust is a beautiful thing.  The tether of all relationships, it is a fundamental human need to trust and be trusted. For this very reason trust also becomes a lever by which operators gain power over people who trust too much.  We trust too much precisely where we have an unmet need, a hunger, a hole that needs to be filled. We need someone or something to fulfil the part of ourselves that we can’t fulfil ourselves, and this makes us vulnerable. From priests and gurus flogging heaven or hell and enlightenment or despair, to slick salespeople, to politicians from Capitol Hill to the Kremlin, to get rich quick schemers and weight loss dreamers, there’s lots of people who know how to play our vulnerabilities while offering a quick fix for the discomfort that lies there.

I don’t want this to seem too dark and cynical.
The play of power and trust is nothing new and it exists everywhere, and possibly most acutely in our most intimate relationships.  We can all be predatory, and we can all be vulnerable; we’re all human. So the question ‘Who do you trust?’ is really not all that useful.  You can trust anyone at least a little, and you can trust no one absolutely.  A more useful question is ‘How do you trust?’.

The Elements of Trust in Contact Improv

I practise an improvisational dance form called ‘Contact Dance’ in which partners completely improvise a dance while staying in physical contact, normally without music. This is an intimate and revealing dance form as your movements and the choices you make are invented in the moment without recourse to external forms or predetermined choreography.  It’s pure personality expressed through physicality.  Typically dancers will exchange weight back and forth and skilled dancers are capable of using momentum and speed to lift one another into the air in astonishingly acrobatic ways.  But besides momentum and speed there’s a lot of trust involved.

When you pour your weight into someone you are putting yourself in their hands, trusting that they will catch you or bear you well or, better yet, move you in a free and liberating way that opens new possibilities.  But there are many different dancers, and every dance is different, and every moment is different, and how much you can trust is something you gauge constantly depending on who your partner is and from moment to moment.  Some people love to bear weight but are afraid to give it, others it‘s the opposite, some can do neither, and some can do both (and good dancing really does require both).  The point is that a good dancer is constantly making good judgements, moment to moment, on how much they can trust their partner.  If you trust someone too much – pour your weight onto someone who is unwilling or unable, or just not quite stable or ready in that moment – you end up on the floor.  Or by trusting someone too much you may allow them to manipulate your body in ways that you’re not comfortable with. Conversely you can try to bear too much weight, or overextend to ‘save/catch’ someone who trusted you too much from a fall, and end up with an injury.

In Contact Dance good trust judgement, good choice, is firstly about knowing yourself: where you are in space, how extended you are, how close you are to the edge of your physical limitations, the state of your own balance in this moment, how daring you feel, your self-knowing of what feels right, right now, in this moment.  Good trust judgement is secondly about having great sensitivity to the dynamic state of your partner microsecond to microsecond: where they are in space, coming towards or going away, pushing or pulling, giving or receiving, solid or soft, or not there at all.  Good trust judgement is thirdly a global awareness of the dance itself, as if it were a third partner with its own agenda: the mood, the tempo, the natural and organic evolution of the dance which neither you nor your partner can fully control.  Most importantly, good judgement is about trusting yourself.  If you trust yourself, and you know how much you can trust your partner, then you can trust the dance.

Please note that I’m not saying “If you can’t trust someone you can’t trust the dance.”  Obviously it’s really helps if you can trust your partner, but I repeat, if “you know how much you can trust, then you can trust the dance.”  You can actually have a very interesting dance with someone you don’t really trust, so long as you trust yourself.  You’ll maintain clarity about your needs, you won’t give them a lot of your weight, you’ll never put yourself in their hands enough to be uncomfortably manipulated, you won’t overextend, and you’ll constantly return to your own centre and balance.

Contact Dance is a great metaphor for trust in all its forms.
How do you deal with a con artist?
You maintain clarity about your needs, you don’t give them a lot of your weight, you never put yourself in their hands enough to be uncomfortably manipulated, you don’t overextend, and you constantly return to your own centre and balance.

Collaborating Without Trust

Julie Diamond, author of ‘Power: A User’s Guide’, gave the keynote address at Berlin Change Days.  Her take on trust is gritty, realistic and refreshing. In her blog post ‘How to Build Trust: Break It First”, Julie starts from the assumption that “No one is ever fully trustworthy… being fully trustworthy is not possible… There are a million reasons why, in any given moment, our behavior undermines our trustworthiness.”
Hello!
Life without unicorns or fairy dust.
We will disappoint, and we will be disappointed [1]For Tibetan Buddhist renegade Chogyam Trungpa “Disappointment is the best chariot on the road of the dharma.”  Disappointment reveals with brilliant clarity the hard difference between our … Continue reading. If we desire trustworthiness in all our relationships, engagements and encounters we’re going to very disappointed.  “Befriend the fact that people are inherently unreliable, and learn to work with it, instead of pretending you can prevent it.” writes Diamond.

Adam Kahane’s most recent book, entitled ‘Collaborating With the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don’t Agree with or Like or Trust’, is dedicated “To my enemies and teachers.” Kahane has worked as a collaboration consultant in plenty of high conflict situations: South Africa during apartheid, Colombia where the toxic cocktail of civil war, poverty, corruption and drug cartels made even the notion of collaboration seem absurd, to name a couple. In these VUCA (Vulnerability, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity) situations conventional collaboration, in which there is a shared understanding of the problem and an agreement of a final goal, doesn’t work.  “In conventional collaboration”, writes Kahane, “we focus on working harmoniously with our team members to work on what is best for the whole team… This approach works when we are in simple situations that are under our control: when all of our perspectives and interests are, or can be made to be, congruent.  But when we are in complex, uncontrolled situations, where our perspectives and interests are at odds, we need to search out and work with our conflicts as well as our connections. We need to fight as well as talk.”

The radical challenge in trying to collaborate with people you don’t trust is to avoid ‘enemyfying’.  If we need to have the final solution, and we need to be able to trust the people we’re working with, then, when those needs aren’t met, we will fall into characterising our co-collaborators as ‘the enemy’. Someone has to be at fault for the failure of the process. I’d rather it not be me, and if it’s not me, it’s them.  But this instinct scuppers the collaboration.

Kahane suggests what he calls ‘Stretch Collaboration’. In Stretch Collaboration participants “do not agree on what their real problem is or on what the solution is – maybe they will never agree and maybe they actually don’t know.”  It requires a capacity to move forward “amid uncertainty and contestation.”
Not for the feint of heart!

Paradoxically, the capacity to bear through the conflict of contestation and the anxiety of uncertainty results in greater connection. It builds trust. In fact, the building of connection (with the ‘enemy’) may be an even more egregious aversion for some than engaging in conflict.

“What is crucial”, according to Kahane, “is to create the conditions under which participants can act freely and creatively, and in doing so create a path forward.”  So, in this form of collaboration, where there is little or no trust or agreement, you are not working towards a common goal, but just towards ‘creating conditions’; a common space in which stories can be told, and heard, and connections can be made.
“They [a collaborative team in Colombia consisting of politicians, drug cartel leaders, human rights activists, civil servants, etc.] collaborated… without having a single focus or goal…
They collaborated without having a single vision or road map…
The team collaborated without being able to change what others were doing.”

“trust is not a precondition to working together, it’s the result.“ writes Kahane.  Enough trust can be grown to embark, together, on small experiments, that can lead to greater experiments; a path forward.

How do we learn to trust ourselves?

How do we trust?
How do we trust ourselves enough to not need to trust others more than they can offer?
How do we trust ourselves enough to not make ourselves vulnerable to exploitation?
Do we trust ourselves enough to bear the uncertainty of working (or living) with people we don’t fully trust?

How do we learn to trust ourselves?
That is a question worth following!

 

References

References
↑1 For Tibetan Buddhist renegade Chogyam Trungpa “Disappointment is the best chariot on the road of the dharma.”  Disappointment reveals with brilliant clarity the hard difference between our desire and what’s actually happening.

Who Do You Trust? (Power & Trust Pt 1)

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How to Play Trust for Power

The theme of Berlin Change Days 2017 was ‘Trust & Power’. One of the earliest exercises of the weekend conference was on the nature of trust and much was made of its significance in positive transformation.  When I think about trust I initially think of how liberating it is.  It’s profoundly liberating to be able to trust someone; a parent, a brother or a sister, a friend, a lover, a mentor, a confidante, a teacher, a therapist.  To be able, with confidence, to open and reveal what is in your mind and heart and body is profoundly liberating and empowering.  It allows you to discover yourself, and brings you home to a unification of your self and your soul.

In one presentation at Berlin Change Days eight pillars of trust were given: honesty, reliability, transparency, clarity, credibility, fairness, keeping promises and respect.  It was suggested by the speaker that many of these pillars must be met successfully for any organisation to succeed. But the last year in the world has been an ominous one, and has cast a strange light on the nature of trust.  Racial tensions and nationalist factions have increased, economic inequalities have increased, the politics of division and regression seem to be in the ascent. The elected leader of the so-called ‘free world’ – still, for the time being, the most powerful country in the world – is essentially devoid of any clear comprehension of or capacity for telling the truth.  “Truth’ for him is simply an expediency, and what is inconvenient is ‘fake news’.  Donald Trump hasn’t demonstrated even one of the eight pillars of trust. And yet a majority of Americans placed their trust in him to become the most powerful man on earth.

Why?  
Because he promised them what they wanted:
that when they lose it’s unfair,
that the system’s rigged against them,
that everyone else is cheating,
that he can make us safe again,
that he can make America great again.  

Besides knowing what you desire every con artist knows that the more you want something – whether it’s methamphetamine or a pipe dream – the less you need the eight pillars of trust to believe in someone, or something. The four balls that a con artist needs to juggle are a knowledge of your desire/fear (desire and fear are flip sides of the same coin), a knowledge of the urgency of that desire/fear, an ability to win (enough of) your trust, and a willingness to exploit you.

I remember being blatantly swindled a couple of times in my youth.  Once I was traveling through a town in the south of Egypt and was pushing for a particularly generous exchange rate on the black market. I wasn’t getting what I wanted, and felt like people were trying to rip me off. I was getting increasingly frustrated when suddenly a young man appeared on a bicycle out of nowhere and offered me the rate I wanted.  We made the deal, and he hopped on his bike and before he was even out of sight I saw that he had duped me by folding over the inside bills as he counted them out to me.  He knew what I wanted, knew that I was getting frustrated, in the few moments that we were engaged his casual and friendly demeanour won my trust, and he was only too happy to take my money. I was a white kid in a poor village in the south of Egypt, and the lad who burned me was just doing what he needed to do to get by.

Another time I was playing music for loose change in a Toronto subway station. During a brief break a very pleasant man came over to tell me how much he loved my music, and how great I was, and wondered if he could help me to get some gigs and make some decent money.  We were good chums by now.  He had to dash off to pick up some merchandise he wanted to show me, and it was pouring rain and cold and he was underdressed so could he borrow my (pretty groovy) jacket, he’d be right back…  You know the rest.  He played my pipe dream, spun – improvised – a brilliant yarn to win my trust, and was ok with casual theft. His focus, engagement and ingeniousness in improvising such a spellbinding yarn was actually worth the price of the jacket.

Trust & Big Data

So, what does a Catholic confessional have in common with Google and Facebook?  They are both trusted with deep secrets, and they store our confessions/data, and this knowledge can be used for power.  In the hands of a trustworthy practitioner confessional can be a liberating experience of safely venting troubling thoughts and experiences in confidence. But there are also unscrupulous practitioners, and the Roman Catholic church’s authority was powerfully reinforced by levering the desire for heaven and the fear of hell for unprecedented access into the secret lives of parishioners. Google and Facebook offer instant access to limitless information, and instant connection and distribution to whole universes of people near and far.  But they also lever our need for access to information and communication, and our urgent desire for social connection, for unprecedented access to floods of data on our relationships, our networks, our purchases, our locations, our ideas, our questions, our convictions, our addictions, our perversions, our sorrows, our hopes and our dreams.  We trust Google and Facebook enough to trade our privacy to gratify our hunger for an instant hit of social connection, and Google and Facebook reap mega profits by charging for market access to custom datasets of people most likely to purchase a product.

The KGB or the CIA in a decade of surveillance and informants couldn’t secure the detail of information on a citizen that billions of people voluntarily pump into Google and Facebook in a month. This notion is taken to a whole new level in a government ‘Social Credit System’ being rolled out in China for 2020 [1]How China Wants to Rate it’s Citizens’, New Yorker.  In this system what you purchase; where you are and where you go; who your friends are and how you interact with them; what you watch and do online; and what bills and taxes you pay (or not) will be tabulated into a single, public, “Citizen Score”. This score [2]‘Big data meets Big Brother as China moves to rate its citizens’, WIREDwill be used to determine your eligibility for a mortgage, a loan, a job, where your children can go to school, whether, and by what mode, you will be able to travel, not to mention your likelihood of landing a date. In an even deeper Orwellian twist, the Citizen Scores of your friends will affect your own score.  The system, which really amounts to a heretofore impossible level of state surveillance, is paradoxically being touted as having the intention of enhancing national “trust” to build a culture of “sincerity”.  Right now the system is voluntary but will in due course be required, but here’s the kicker, people are already signing up for it in droves. Why? There are lures: rewards and “special privileges” for citizens who prove themselves to be “trustworthy”. Already Chinese citizens boast of their scores on social media.  

Remember the four balls that a con artist needs to juggle: a knowledge of your desire, a knowledge of the urgency of that desire, an ability to win your trust, and a willingness to exploit you.  The Social Credit System, with such transparent access to its citizens habits and patterns, can manipulate the relationship of trust in previously impossible ways by preying on its citizenry’s desire for approval and status to gain power and control over them.

Who do you trust?

 

 

Pt.2, ‘How Do You Trust’, coming soon!

References