Who relies on trust has already lost?

soft skills and soft values are “in”. They are supposed to solve today’s major organizational problems, which, for lack of a more precise critique – and often without deeper understanding of the concept – are readily summarized by a single name: Taylorism.

Initial studies seem to indicate that the course is not wrong, but, where feel-good is in the room, ideological impulses always play a role, and we would do well to remain cautious and alert of publication bias.

The Confidence Game

When I ask people what they mean by “trust” or comparably abstract terms like “love,” “empathy,” “appreciation,” it usually turns psychological. For “empathy” there are some concrete ideas – with “appreciation” it quickly becomes educational. But when we turn to “love” and even more so to “trust”, many start to flounder and talk about their own feelings – and that usually in circles.

This demonstrates a problem, or rather failure of our educational systems, that children are not taught how to penetrate their own concepts in such a way that concept emerge with which they are able to work practically. And most adults are so used to not being able to say what they mean that, conversely, they consider it normal not to mean what they say. That we argue with others about what they supposedly meant is already somehow a bit strange …

Anyone who is used to working in the humanities knows how important clear concepts are. They form the basis and nodes of our theories and models. Where they weaken, the whole construct cannot work.

The same is true for coaching, consulting, organizational design and development: If you do not comprehend your own language, it will become difficult to assess at which points the whole building will collapse. Let us not give up advantages from linear, goal-oriented, logical approaches because of weaknesses of one-sided approaches.

Approaching trust from a feeling level comes with some difficulties:

All abstract concepts such as “trust,” “appreciation,” “empathy,” “love,” … work paradoxically. They always bring out their opposite.

If I want to talk in a team about how important it is for all of us to trust each other, each individual will instantly have to deal with the fact that everyone else is also thinking about how their trust is broken. If, on top of that, no one is really aware of how trust works for him or her, it is only a matter of time before mistrust dominates the whole team culture.

This can be clearly seen in unreflective New Work and participation attempts, where fears of boundary violations and abuse of trust lead to the well-intentioned creative approach being collectively thwarted. Together, pseudo-symmetrical relationship dynamics are created around which anticipatory disappointments of expectations play out in a comparable way into interpunctuations that determine usually only half-consciously or unconsciously what may be said and how.

This can reach so deep that, when a certain point of communal rhythmizing into this jointly invented/conditioned symmetry is exceeded, no more criticism can be exercised, because criticism is not allowed any longer. Then we have the originally linear-hierarchical problem as a complex organizational one suddenly in the well-intentioned attempt again – and all this because the concept was not well enough thought through and because the terms were not well enough brought to the point.

The emotion-oriented, psychological concept of trust works like this:

Trust → hope that rules (of the game) will not be broken.

The rules do not have to be conscious to the person(s) involved. Primal trust of newborns is anything but conscious and can be broken so quickly when what was still taken for granted in the womb suddenly works completely differently, and when the caring hand and nurturing warmth and voice does the opposite of what was expected and even hurts …

But a purely psychological, one-sided concept is not enough, as we all know when we realise: The trust was one-sided, the contracting party had no intention of playing the game with us at all, but had something else in mind entirely.

A reciprocal notion of trust does not help either:

Trust → reciprocal expectations that the (game) rules will not be broken.

This notion of trust now gets us quite into trouble, because mutual expectations are usually not negotiated outside of clear notarial contract levels. They usually float unspoken in the communicational atmosphere and thus become the basis of all conceivable conflicts, disruptions, interpunctuations, daily frictions and so on. When it f.i. comes to Putin, we are currently experiencing what happens when one of the parties involved also shams a relationship of trust, or when the others deceive themselves into believing that such a relationship exists.

The problem with such terms: Their paradox

We buy at the same time into mutual distrust and the three-fold drama of victim/perpetrator/savior.

Anyone who tries to talk to friends, partners, colleagues about how to better trust each other is embarking on a problematic course. And it gets even worse when organizations start talking about creating a foundation of trust within their organizations … Every systems researcher knows: systems that discuss trust have a problem.

Trust is often talked about in advertising. How do companies get the idea to transfer this game (which is clearly recognizable as not truthful to them there) to their employees?

If we ask people or organizations to earn the trust of their customers through language, we are asking them to give away trust in themselves. We are asking them to distrust themselves by using language that does not do justice to the matter at hand. Often, in fact, the proposal to create trust comes from mistrust. The result: attempts to justify. Why? Because we are operating very close to status games here.

Thus, in the wake of discussions about appreciation, empathy, and trust, we can see again and again how this leads to ideological impulses taking hold: First some, then more and more people are seduced by these discussions to rewrite their own disappointments of expectations into control programs: “Now, I find that not very appreciative of you!”, “I can not trust you right now!”, or even: “I was annoyed with you: not in that tone!”

Even more, on top of that, the trust problem is often seen as a deficit problem of the person who cannot trust. The concerned person is psychologized, potential factual levels are abandoned in favor of ideologized levels of relationship. No functional organizational design thrives on the soil of such unhealthy conceptual constructs! No one who wants to work sustainably and achieve something can want the complex, emotionally charged, and, even more fundamentally insincere conflicts that emerge from this.

The paradoxes inevitably bring with them cultures of gleichschaltung and control – most of them unconscious at first, but gradually conscious control mechanisms can be observed in such developments.

If I call for trust by initiating the discussion of trust, I immediately initiate reflection and communication about mistrust – and not without good reason.

Con-artists base their shams on such concepts. Donald Trump’s “Trust me!” leads right into the middle of the paradox and motivates his voters to repeatedly fill up for him and answer positively to the question of trust. He gets them to play along with his Con and to argue for him with his critics and opponents. And the more they do that, the more they have to trust him, because with every action they invest in him, and loss aversion plays into his hands.

On such bases, people in corporate cultures are suddenly supposed to trust?

Even if I adopt a psychological-emotional concept of trust, it is still an intimate, a private thing. Nothing good can come of asking people to discuss their trust publicly in the long run. How shall we even imagine that? That I suddenly declare that I can not stand the employees Meier, Mueller and Schultz and that I do not trust them? Quite apart from the fact that everyone will think twice before doing something like this, we also have to ask the question here of the impossible situation we are putting not only myself but also Mr. and Ms. Meier, Mueller and Schultz in …

How does this work then? That certain employees earn trust points because they are liked more, while those who may not be able to operate the programs as well – such as people on the neurodiverse spectrum, for example, or simply people who do not like to reveal everything about themselves – are trusted less? What kind of structures, what kind of social architectures will emerge?

What kind of power games can we expect then?

It is no wonder when ideological impulses take hold in this context:

Trust is closely related to faith – as trust in God. With cultures of trust, we run the risk of evoking religious behavior. In plain language, this means that we always buy into some form of purification behavior: Inquisition!

Who does not have the right trust in God, he must be brought on course again. If that does not work, he will be excluded. There are reasons why proposals for the trust discussion so often come from esotericists. Their worldview hypotheses usually work hierarchically – so status games are just a matter of time and mass there, and soft values are perfectly suited for such games.

The Antithesis

If I really want to talk about trust, I should keep my own expectations in mind. Reflection on one’s own expectations is the way out of this paradox, the way out of mutual abuse of trust, the way out of shams and status games.

If I know the problems connected with such concepts, I am also able to think about how I assess the situation, and for this I neither need the trust of others, nor do I depend on trusting others. It is enough to learn to assess better and better and to understand every disappointment of expectations as self-deception.

I replace trust in others with self-trust.

Mutual trust creates mutual dependence. Each then experiences only the other. If a breach of trust occurs, this leads to mutual recriminations, which put even more strain on the cooperation system.

It is more effective to consider what will happen and then to trust your own assessment.

To this end, educational programs must be made available so that employees and fellow citizens can learn to replace trust in others with functional models of reflection and thus with self-criticism and self-confidence.

Otherwise, there is a risk that people will only trust their preconceptions to come true afterwards, and that is just as useless as mutual dependence, in which the respective other is supposed to fulfill what we want.

Conclusion

After several thousands of years we may finally realize: The project “love” has failed.
Everything that can be ideologized will be ideologized. soft values ideologize faster than anything else. It is the associated feelings of well-being and the control programs that follow them that stabilize the ideology.

The way out of this is to learn to work out trust self-referentially and to leave the trust game completely.

The better people can do this, the better cooperative relationships will work.

Experience teaches:

People who can manage complexity on higher dimensions are better able to deal with disappointment. And each of us knows: Good relationships thrive on the fact that mutual trust is limited to one important area, namely that of knowing: The dispute will not separate us, because all parties involved work with self-criticism and reflected self-confidence.

Therefore, complexity masters also know: the worst to trust are those who are not good at dealing with strife and conflict and who project their disappointments of expectation outward.

From this follows simply and evidently:

Train your teams to deal with conflict in a self-critically reflective way. This does not mean making pets out of conflicts, but on the contrary, being able to dance the pogo.

So train them in rhetoric, in rational argumentation skills, in basic systemic concepts and FORMlogical analyses of conflict and cooperation systems. Help your employees to be able to manage complexity at higher levels and to a responsible concept of trust, and you will gradually obtain resilient and sustainable communication organizations that can do more than trust: They can comphrehend conflicts as reorganization processes.

Subsequent reading material in German:

Systemic concept of conflict: https://www.carl-auer.de/magazin/systemzeit/konflikte-wenn-systeme-sich-bilden
Complexity management: https://www.carl-auer.de/magazin/systemzeit/komplexitatsmanagement-modell-stufen-formen

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