Our research gives us tremendous hope for the future, because collectively organizations have the resources and power to change the world by creating and maintaining trust.

The Urgent Need to Build Trust Today

Our friend David Kirby of Ford offers this poignant analogy for how essential trust is to the fabric of our society: If you go to a meeting in a conference room, the first thing you do is find an empty chair and sit down at the table. Imagine one day you pull up the nearest chair and plop down. Before you know what happened, you find yourself with an ungraceful landing on the floor, the broken chair upturned beside you. The next day, will you sit down immediately, or will you instead check your chair first?

If you have to check your chair every time you sit, or confirm your bank is holding your money safe, or sniff‐test your food every time you eat … If you have to wonder if a product will work as advertised, or question whether your employers will keep their promises … If you have to do all these things, you won't have time to do much more.

Trust is foundational to human progress. Tens of thousands of years ago, humans lived in small nomadic groups that traveled together, hunted together, and gathered periodically with other groups. Out of this grew tribal culture, and eventually individuals took on specialized roles. Some hunted. Some gathered food. Others made tools and created useful objects. Some raised children, and others tended animals. You didn't steal food from somebody in your tribe because you needed the tools she was making.

As societies evolved, spoken languages developed and were later written down. Much of the earliest writing recorded transactions in a barter economy as a way of preserving records and “enforcing” trust.²¹¹ These ten sheep skins in exchange for those five sharpened blades. There is a practical reason that happened. Humans can maintain about 150 social relationships at a time. After that we need analogues like writing to record and remember information important to relationships.²¹²

In this way, implicit trust from within the tribe could be extended to those outside the tribe. Trust was less about whose tribe or family you were from. Instead, trust was replaced by written contracts and laws. Those who were trustworthy relied on a framework of rules (called the “rule of law”) to trust people they didn't know. The untrustworthy were forced into some degree of good behavior by threat of punishment.

This is how you codify trust among millions—by creating ways that the trustworthy can continue their lives and work, protected from the untrustworthy by social institutions. Trust in abstractions like “money” grew out of a need to carry on transactions beyond barter.

Now, however, we believe that the world is facing a trust deficit that has a direct impact on national economic performance. In Chapter 2 we shared that economists Paul Zak and Stephen Knack found that a 15 percent rise in a nation's belief that “most people can be trusted” adds a full percentage point to economic growth every year.²¹³ If you apply the economists’ math to the global economy at the time of this writing, you find that a 15 percent rise in belief that most people can be trusted would add $847 billion (!) to annual GDP.²¹⁴

Why Organizations Must Lead the Way

Even though trust has eroded, companies and nonprofits are starting from a position of relative strength in society. We believe that gives organizations the opportunity—and responsibility—to revitalize trust. There are three reasons in particular that we want to highlight:

• Demonstrated track record of innovation and agility
• Relative position of strength
• Building trust is an economic imperative

Principles for Building Trust

We want to leave you with a final word on five principles you can use to turn trust into a discipline that elevates the human experience for your workers, customers, and partners.

• First, humanize yourself, modeling trustworthy leadership behaviors to your teams.
• Then measure trust and the component factors of humanity, transparency, capability, and reliability. The HX TrustID questions are free to use, and we hope that you will take them and apply them to your organization.
• Design humanity, transparency, capability, and reliability into your organizational culture so they are part of every interaction.
• Don't go it alone. We hope we have demonstrated through the stories we shared that building trust is a coordinated team effort across every part of the organization and partner ecosystem.
• Finally, lead with transparency by reporting on trust both internally with your teams and externally in your public statements.

It is our ambition to build trust and help leaders positively impact the humans in their ecosystem. And we can do this while continuing to drive profitable growth, which can be a powerful fuel for good. After all, profit is how capital creates both more jobs and better jobs.²²¹ In nonprofit companies, revenue is the fuel that turns ideas and values into real‐world results. After the revenues and profits are earned and put to use, though, the larger questions remain: “Am I improving the world? Am I fulfilling a greater mission? Do I work for more than wealth, power, or fame?”

We are passionate about building trust to elevate the human experience because it creates the types of organizations we want to belong to, and the type of world in which we want to live.