Trusted Politicians

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Sound like an oxymoron?

There’s good reason for that.  Not just in fact, but in principle, it is hard to square politics with trust. Trusting a politician may be an exercise in pre-meditated resentment.

Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara once said,  referring to interacting with the press, “never answer the question you are asked; always answer the question you wanted to be asked.”

That may or may not be a good recipe for politicians; it is certainly bad advice for anyone who would be trusted. It speaks volumes to the desire to control others’ opinions, refuse to engage, and to willingness to appear evasive.

Mark Twain’s comment, “Congress is the only distinctly criminal class” is typical of our desire to believe otherwise—and our continued disappointment when the next politician reveals his colors. “Meet the new boss—same as the old boss,” sang Roger Daltrey years ago.

There’s a reason. Politics requires a continual calculation of how to align with the majority. A minority politician is, pretty soon, a losing politician. Passing legislation requires convincing others; getting elected requires convincing others. The art (or science, increasingly) of politics is combining effective majorities across various issues, while minimizing the perception of the minorities as being on the other side.

That means there is virtually no single principle that a successful politician can afford to consistently endorse.

Yet all the while, we engage with politicians in a mutual conspiracy to deny that this is the case. We insist on believing that politicians believe in principle; and they in turn use the language of principle, in order to gain our votes.

Then we become outraged in the cases when politicians are caught violating their principles—whether it’s Republican homophobes caught with their pants down, or Democratic social liberals invested in subprime mortgages.

Logically, we should not be enraged. Humanly, we are. Because we want to trust, and trust requires some measure of consistency around principles.

The answer may lie partly in losing our innocence. Trust in politics arguably requires term limits. Only lame ducks can afford to vote from principle.

On the other hand, to surrender to cynicism and accept politics as merely an exercise in coalition-building is to move in the direction of single-issue politics—abandoning the middle, and any hope for unity.

Or, to continue to hope for the best—a politician with just enough principles and persuasive capability to actually sway opinion. To create a majority where none existed.  A real leader, in short.

Well, hope springs eternal.
 

An Honest Wedding

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I went to an unusual wedding last week in Western Michigan.  It doesn’t matter whose (except to note it wasn’t mine)—call them John and Jane.

Bride and groom are both in their early 50s. She has two daughters, each in their early 20s. He has a son 16 and a daughter 11. It’s a second marriage for both.

The minister defined eclectic; she had spiritual credentials from several traditions. The ceremony featured candles and white rose petals, and was held upstairs from the minister’s husband’s bike shop.  Of the nine attendees (which includes bride, groom, minister and children), five of us chose the optional bare feet mode.

The minister said:

Like all weddings, this is a joyous celebration, a union of two soul-mates who have found each other.  A time for joy.

Yet joy isn’t the only thing that happens at a wedding like this.  There are three others who are not here, but whose presence is very real, and felt by all who are here.

We would not be honest if we did not speak of them.  And honesty is vital if this marriage, and all in this room, are to  thrive and prosper.  And so we will be honest here today.

One presence is a deceased mother, who left behind a husband—John—their 13-year old boy, and their 8-year old girl. Her children here today miss her; John senses her presence too; and Jane feels it as well.

Second is a divorced husband—the father, with Jane, to these two daughters in their twenties. The daughters see their mother with a new husband, and seek new definitions of “home” and “parent” and “marriage.”

The third is cancer.  It was cancer that claimed John’s former wife, the teens’ mother.  But Jane understands too—because Jane herself is a two-time cancer survivor.  The children know what cancer means; and John and Jane have their eyes wide open about it.
 
These three presences raise powerful issues for everyone in this room—which is why we speak of them.

As the minister spoke, I’m sure I saw the four children become more at ease.  I felt it, and think the other adults did as well.

Afterwards we ate fruit and cake.  Then we drove to Lake Michigan, changed into shorts and got wet and red from the end-of-summer sun.

We talked about truth-telling, of living in the moment.  But mostly we talked about being free of labels and roles, of learning to see and accept things just as they are.

It was a fine wedding.  An honest wedding.

The Cold War, the Hot Line and Twitter

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August 30 was the 44th anniversary of the "Hot Line" linking the White House and the Kremlin, developed after the Cuban Missile Crisis as a way to prevent future such crises.

I recall vague images of a red, rotary-style telephone, with translators hovering over Krushchev and Kennedy, all ears glued to the receiver.

In truth, while it was dedicated, it was more a line than a handset; and it took 15 minutes to set up a call.

But the idea seems sound. By linking the Head of the Free World and the Head Red, world wars would be averted.

And—indeed, we’ve had no world wars since. Of course, we can’t infer from their absence that the Hot Line can take credit.

Yet we tend to treat communication as a panacea. How many times have you heard (or said) that the key to world peace (or a happy marriage, or racial harmony) “all boils down to communication. If everyone just communicated more, it’d all work out.”

What if the Red Phone had always been on? A permanent connection, picking up everything on each end?

What if JFK and Krushchev had had access to—Twitter?

Twitter is software that allows users to digitally emulate being a Siamese twin, sharing via cellphones or IMs material like “I’m going to go get a coke,” or “it’s really humid today,” or "I just had two bowls of curry." It tells you how many seconds old the news is. (Barack Obama is on Twitter. So’s Hillary. Rudy’s entry is a month old. No surprises.)

If some communication is good—isn’t more better?

Maybe not.

The world is already a-twitter. Think cell phone conversations on the bus or train. Popup ads. Spam. Facebook’s Wall. Everything-cams. Ads that address you as “America.” Message-based t-shirts and bumper stickers. Waiters who tell you their name.

Communication may be necessary—but it’s not sufficient. The world probably is safer when leaders look face to face, rather than demonize from afar. Sales and negotiation and relationships all benefit from greater communication.

But familiarity breeds contempt. Taking a bathroom break? TMI, thanks very much. And I’d prefer Snakes on Planes to Cellphones in the Friendly Skies.

Effective communication requires, three prerequisites:

  • Veto power,
  • Permission, and
  • Relevance

I want to be able to shut you out when I want; I need a mute button or kill switch before I let you in at all.

For me to re-up—to keep my channel open—you need to continually earn the right to my attention, by being relevant. And relevance isn’t a fixed function of content; it’s the result of constantly monitoring what my current hot-buttons are, and—respectfully—offering content to match.

Communication isn’t just an “always-on” shared experience. It can feel that way when young, when the heady sense of connection with an Other relieves the pain of teen-age alienation.

But as we mature, communication looks more like a constantly renewing process of gaining permission through observing, noticing, making assessments of the Other’s interests. With respect. Including knowing when to leave well enough alone.

Silence is often the best communication. The Quakers got that right.
 

Carnival of Trust for September

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The Carnival of Trust is being hosted this month by David Maister; you’ll find it at http://davidmaister.com/blog/476/  . 

For those of you who don’t know him, David is the pre-eminent consultant and guru in the field of professional services.  He’s also my co-author, along with Rob Galford, of The Trusted Advisor. 

David has put together an excellent selection of trust-related blog postings in several business arenas, as well as in the world at large. 

Have a look, it’s worth your time.

The Credit Crisis and Trust Networks

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What do analyses of social networks and trust have in common with the subprime-mortgage credit crisis? Quite a bit, it turns out.

The NYTimes on Sept. 2, in “Can the Mortgage Crisis Swallow a Town?” introduces the Egglestons of Maple Heights, Ohio. They’re a hardworking family trying to sell their house in a market where prices are falling—because too many neighbors are selling—because banks are foreclosing—because owners bought exotic mortgage-crack they can no longer afford.

The same article describes a business victim: Mark Stefanski, CEO of Third Federal Savings and Loan, a Cleveland thrift that his parents founded in 1938.

Unlike most of his competitors, Mr. Stefanski resisted the urge to cash in on the subprime lending boom…

“The model has shifted,” says Mr. Stefanski. “It became very lucrative. But it was totally irresponsible for the sake of greed.” Not that Mr. Stefanski didn’t notice the profits to be had. “Absolutely, we were tempted,” he acknowledges. “We arm-wrestled and talked, but we decided not to change the model. We felt it wasn’t the right thing to do.”

Mr. Stefanski is no social worker. He lives in an affluent suburb of Cleveland and earned nearly $2 million last year. But he does not hide his feelings about just what went wrong in places like Maple Heights. “The whole system was based on raping the public,” he says, matter-of-factly. “Not everyone should own a home — just those who can afford it.”

Third Federal has a branch in Maple Heights, Mr. Stefanski says, and in the past, “we owned Maple Heights.” But in recent years, he says, “The predators just jumped on it.”

Third Federal’s share of the mortgage market in northeastern Ohio fell to a low of about 11 percent by 2001 from more than 30 percent in the early 1990s.

Back to trusted social networks.

There’s a lot of interest in using digital technologies to help connect people. The economic gains of lowered transaction costs from trust are real—it isn’t just a blogosphere fad.

The problem with trust is—at heart it’s an analogue function in a world of digital suitors.

Put too many degrees of separation between you and another, and trust falls down. The decay rate of trust from my LinkedIn friend to my friend’s friend is huge.

As my friend David Krathwohl says, “I’ll trust a seller’s eBay ranking to buy a book; that doesn’t mean I’ll introduce him to my daughter.”

Back to mortgages.

When a bank owns the mortgage, the bank earns money—or not—when the borrower pays back the loan—or defaults. When the owner of the mortgage is four times removed—when the mortgage is sold, then securitized, then re-sold as part of a package of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs)—that incentive is removed. The nth "owner" of the mortgage—the CDO buyer—doesn’t re-check the credit risk.

Bank regulations once addressed loose lending; there is no such regulation on the underlying credit risk for CDOs. As the Sept. 2 NY Times Magazine article "Subprime Time" describes, they depended on ratings agencies.

Like addicts seeking a faster high, banks and ratings agencies switched to the fast fees of transaction income over the longer returns of relationship banking. Ditto the ratings agencies. Ditto the securitizers.

The new system made for a more liquid market; sounds good, right? It spread risk; another good. And it substituted efficient markets for local cottage industries. More good.

But the whole thing also rested on turning relationships into transactions. This is the dark side of business process re-engineering, Web 2.0, and globalization—everything can be sliced and diced and outsourced to others in the name of efficiency and liquidity. But at each point, a diet of transactions-only starves relationships—and therefore trust.  (For a far more financially literate discussion of this dark side of liquidity, see Equity Private’s Liquid Reflections of August 31).

Degrees of separation matter. Not everyone reacts like Mr. Stefanski, and he can’t carry the load alone.

Too many degrees and you get the musical chairs game: I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone, let’s just do this deal and get out before the music stops. Greed thrives, ethics starve. As with all relationships deprived of the currency of the Real, things can get pretty transactional pretty fast.

It’s ironic. What sounds like sound principles of insurance (spread the risk), banking (liquidity), and networking (spread the contacts), end up producing endemic greed, visiting disaster on consumers, and punishing ethical businesspeople.

Trust doesn’t travel well digitally. A song loses no data when it’s digitally copied—but digital replication of trust loses heart. A "trust network" based solely on transactions is a network devoid of all but the narrowest version of trust—a track record with no memory of what it is supposed to be tracking.

Social Network Mapping and Trust

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John Rolander, one of the good people at Katzenbach Partners , pointed me to a fine piece in Fortune Magazine about their work in OQ—Organizational Quotient. (July 23, 2007).

Katzenbach is a leader in identifying and analyzing the “constellation of collaborations, relationships and networks” that are responsible for much of an organization’s real effectiveness, and which is quite distinct from the formal organizational chart.

“Jon Katzenbach [calls the] ability to toggle between both power structures ‘organizational quotient,’ or OQ.”

Katzenbach helped Bell Canada scour 50,000 employees to identify “14 low- and mid-level managers who embodied the mentality the company sought: committed, passionate, and competitive. Here’s what they found:

The subjects shared the ability to get people to trust them and to solve problems rather than complain about them. “These people have incredible influence. It’s like the Life Cereal commercial—Will Mikey eat it?”

You could say this is yawningly obvious; but only in the rear-view mirror. Which makes it worth emphasizing.

First, these are 14 massively influential people. Influence doesn’t happen by accident. These people attract others. To be proper, others are attracted to them.

What attracts others? Their perceived trustworthiness; and their propensity to solve rather than complain.

As Phil McGee (who I’m appointing as a business guru) puts it, “All business problems boil down to two: a tendency to blame, and an inability to confront.” That’s the negative way to put it.

The positive way to put it is, business works best when driven by people who take responsibility, and who are trusted by others.

There is an awful lot of stuff written about how to be trusted. Listening. Eye contact. Networks. And so on.

We tend to forget that true trust is only earned by being trustworthy—which means, literally, worthy of trust. All else is fakery. Ask someone why they trust so-and-so, and you’ll always get two things near the top of the list—"he has my best interests at heart," and "I can trust him to speak the truth."

"Blame" reeks of falsehood—the word has connotations of evading responsibilty, lying about accountability. Valid assignment of responsibilty is devoid of “blame,” and the true measure of validity is whether one is willing to take on responsibility oneself. Clear assignment of responsibility speaks to both putting principles ahead of self-interest, and to speaking truth rather than spinning it.

So the presence of blame is a sure-fire signal of the lack of trustworthiness. How can you trust someone who will not take responsibility?

All of which is to say, mapping of social networks reveals something very fundamental—trust nodes.

Well done.

[Footnote: I must add, there is also a small irony here. As Katzenbach says in the article, “the informal organization is most helpful when you’re trying to influence behaviors that are more emotional than they are rational.”

The irony lies in the need for most organizations to have rational proof of the power of emotions over rationality.

Then again—whatever works ]

Defining Trust by Defining Moments – Larry Craig’s

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If you wanted a definition of trust, you could look it up in Webster’s. Or perhaps in Wikipedia—but it’s kind of complicated.

Or, you could recognize that definitions are ultimately anthropological, and go straight for a source. Say, an editorial on Idaho’s Senator-at-this-moment Larry Craig in the North Idaho Press, which says:

We urge Sen. Craig to remove all the clouds and resign.

This is not a moral judgment, not in the sense that some want Craig ousted for alleged homosexual behavior that’s been rumored for many years. Nor is it an indictment of his tepid stance in the Iraq war or his unpopular support of President Bush’s proposed immigration reform.

It is a recommendation based upon the fact that the people of Idaho cannot trust their most powerful representative in the nation’s capital.

What can we infer about trust from this one simple example?

First, trust is pretty powerful. Calls by newspapers for the resignation of a home-state senator are very rare. Yet the reasoning for the call rests on the invocation of a single word—trust.

Lack of trust often has to do with deception—withholding truth, covering up, not being transparent. In this case, the paper says,

Worse, he tried to keep the whole thing secret. And by all appearances, he nearly got away with it… the senator had ample time not just to decide his best course of legal action, but to tell the nation what was going on [yet did not]

Deception can bleed into straight up lying—as the paper suggests,

He is extremely intelligent and fully versed in legal procedure. We cannot accept that, in a hurry, he made a bad call that has clouded his future — and the state’s.

Closely related is whether or not someone takes appropriate responsibility, as opposed to blaming others. The editorial says:

the senator did not own up to his misdemeanor crime. He did not apologize to his family, to the fabulous staff that has supported him for more than a quarter century in Congress, to his constituents here in Idaho.

If you had just dropped in from Mars and read only this one editorial, you’d get a good sense of what the human race means by trust. It means transparency; it means taking responsibility; it means telling the truth.

And—at least in some cases—earthlings appear to take it pretty seriously.

I Can’t Make You Love Me–If You Don’t

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That’s the title of one of my favorite songs; a soulfully beautiful breakup song by Bonnie Raitt.

I’m not alone; one commenter on the song says, “I personally consider this the best song of the 90s.”

My favorite detail: the very first notes on the track are a brushstroke and two taps on the snare drum, followed by a big, mellow electronic piano-cum-bass drum chord. The mics on the drums reveal a warm small-room echo—this is live, real, unprocessed music by a pro—singing about reality. Like the song.

Songfacts says the song

…was written by the songwriting team of Mike Reid and Allen Shamblin. Reid got the idea from a newspaper article about a guy who got drunk and shot up his girlfriend’s car. When the judge sentenced him and asked him what he had learned, he said, "You can’t make a woman love you if she don’t."

Never mind my taste in music. Red and Shamblin had an ear for one of those micro-moments that serve as metaphor for larger truths. You can’t make a woman love you if she don’t.

Ain’t it the truth.

And ain’t it a metaphor. You can’t make a man love you if he don’t, either. You can’t make your child do what you want, if they won’t. You can’t make your ex- do what you’d like, if they won’t. You can’t make an alcoholic stop drinking, if he won’t.

You can’t make someone trust you, if they don’t. You can’t make a person change, if they won’t. You can’t make an organization change, if it won’t. You can’t make someone buy from you, if they won’t.

You can’t make someone like you, if they don’t. You can’t make someone want what you want, if they don’t (even a great song). You can’t make someone believe what you believe, if they don’t.

There are pretty much only two things you can do. One is to give up the attachment to those outcomes. The other is to change yourself.

Because you can do all those things—to yourself.

You can make yourself love someone; as Steven Covey reminded us in Seven Habits, love is a verb, not a passive state of consciousness.

You can make yourself happy—or not. You can make yourself trust someone—or not. You can live in the moment—or not. You can stop drinking, or eating, or smoking—or not.

Like the man in court found out, trying to make other people do things they won’t is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die.

Pain is inevitable—but suffering is optional. You don’t have to take the poison. There are other girls, other guys, other days, other organizations.

Detach from the outcome.

Then go create yourself a new one.

Call for Submissions for the September Carnival of Trust!

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Carnival of Trust Logo

The fourth Carnival of Trust is fast approaching and will go live on Tuesday September 4th. The deadline for entries is this coming Thursday, August 30th. This edition will be hosted by David Maister, co-Author of The Trusted Advisor. David is perhaps the premier thinker in professional services managment, an industry whose entire business model is built around the idea of trusted advisor relationships, and as such I’m very much looking forward to reading his selection of articles.

As I wrote when announcing the first Carnival of Trust my hope and ambition for the carnival is to begin establishing a home base, a center of gravity, for people who are interested in fostering greater trusted relationships in various realms of the world.

While my own material is primarily business-oriented, the Carnival of Trust will be explicitly more broad than business alone. Trust is heavily personal in nature, and I hope the submissions will reflect that—postings that deal with personal trust, business trust, and political trust are welcome, as well as pieces on the nature of trust.

There is a hard limit of 10 postings per Carnival. The host will personally make the decisions about inclusion, in an inevitably subjective manner intended to push the thinking ahead in those broad areas of trust.

I invite, encourage and urge you to submit pieces for the Carnival. You can submit them here.

The first, second and third carnivals of trust had some great articles I urge you to read if you haven’t already.

And I look forward to reading your articles in the September Carnival.

Trust Networks vs. Search Engines

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Those who understand the technical aspects of current hot themes like social networking (think Facebook ), are all a-twitter over a post last weekend by Robert Scoble, a (deservedly) influential tech blogger.

Nominally about whether Google will be dethroned by some upstarts , his post has generated many over-heated comments of the “Yankees suck” variety. (A notable exception is “Turbo” Todd Watson’s posting on the subject).

But commenters aside, Scoble is pouring some very good old wine into some very promising new bottles. The issue is: who do you trust?

Do you trust:

a. A compilation of information (encyclopedia, Blue Book, Google, classified ads, Yellow Pages), or

b. Your friends?

The best known net-based version of the former, of course, is search engines.

The net-based terminology du jour for the latter is trust networks—think Old Boys’ network, bowling leagues (going way back), and more recently Friendster, MySpace, LinkedIn and Plaxo, and—todays’ hot item—Facebook.

The right answer is—as it always is in these cases—it depends. In this case, it depends on what problem you are trying to solve.

If you’re trying to buy a used car, you probably value masses of information over your friends’ recommendations, no matter how smart your friends are—because you’re trying to assess a market. The bigger and more liquid the market you seek to tap, the more you’ll value objective, massive information. Score one for the compilation model of the world.

If you’re trying to decide whether or not you should talk to your daughter about how she’s making the mistake of her life by going out with that no-good idiot, you don’t care about markets—you care about wisdom from people who know you and your life. Score one for a network of friends; the trust network.

In the real world (I mean outside the blogosphere), there is no shortage of either kind of problem, and it will always be so. These are merely chapters in the ongoing book about how we come to trust, and to make use of new technologies to do so.