Modern ideas about economics and society have pushed humans to become more individualistic, organizations to become more globalized, and relationships between everyone to become more disposable. The result is a crisis of trust. We have designed the world to be anti-relational which has worked for a time, but it is now proving to be an extremely fragile approach to organizing society. This design is ideological and totally unrealistic. It’s not how humans work. To restore trust, we need to design a human-centered economy built on the way humans actually thrive in localized communities. This essay looks at the latest research on how businesses and institutions can rebuild trust as well as improve their performance.

In the age of new media, as leaders in various types of institutions, we are constantly being told to grow our social presence. We are coached by publishers and marketing experts, “Get more followers!” “Build your online clout!” “Build your platform!”

This advice is for good reason. The world is cluttered with information and ideas. As we consume this information we are constantly applying the filter of a person’s online clout as a measure of the credibility of the person and their information. We look at the number and quality of followers to assess if the person communicating is “trustworthy.”

There is no doubt that online networks give leaders new types of influence and global reach. According to Professor Adam Grant, one of the world's most recognized management thinkers, networks come with three major attributes: power, access to diverse skills, and private information. It is also obvious that platforms like social networks, wikis, crowd funding, and crowdsourcing are innovative tools for people of all walks of life to contribute their ideas and insights. However, when we need to solve complex social and economic problems or even everyday problems that require cooperation, are massive social networks and online platforms the full solution?

In the wake of the various social media scandals, for example, Facebook’s complicity in the Cambridge Analytica’s unethical disruption of democracy, YouTube’s child pornography scandals or the rising psychological toll social media has taken on mental health, we are all beginning to question the trustworthiness of large, global social networks. All of these violations of trust put the ‘social license’ of these businesses to operate at high risk. Businesses and organizations that are increasingly relying on social media as their primary way to relate to society may also become vulnerable to these risks. Could there be another way to relate in the 21st century that will help businesses and organizations be more sustainable and durable over the long term?

A mathematical case for community  

In 2017, a group of scientists, mathematicians and researchers from Harvard University and Emmanuel College, including Fields Medal winner Shing-Tung Yau, set out to understand which types of social structures lead to the best cooperation. According to the Harvard Gazette, key insights from the research include:

• “Large social networks foster connections by erasing national, geographic, and even linguistic barriers. But when it comes to fostering cooperation, global connectivity leaves something to be desired.”

• “More connectivity won’t necessarily promote people being good to each other. It’s not that global connections are bad, but they are no substitute for a small number of strong local connections.”

• “We can take any graph or social network, and if it has strong pairwise ties, that is what is most conducive for cooperation. This is a mathematical argument for stable families or for stable friendships.”

It sounds like common sense right? Aren’t we building trusted relationships in our businesses and organizations?

Unfortunately, we are struggling at building trust. A recent global survey showed that trust in institutions is at an all-time low in across Western society. This trend is not sustainable. Without trust, our societies and our civilization will slowly degrade into anarchy. The plethora of dystopian books and films clearly warns us of this ever present risk for humanity. If we know that trust is so valuable, how can we redesign how our organizations to rebuild trust? How can we perform and communicate in a way that builds strong, cooperative relationships?  

Part of the challenge is that modern ideas about economics and society have pushed humans to become more individualistic, organizations to become more globalized, and relationships between everyone to become more disposable. It is no wonder that trust has fallen. We have designed the world to be anti-relational which has worked for a time, but it is now proving to be an extremely fragile approach to organizing society. This design is ideological and totally unrealistic. It’s not how humans work. To restore trust, we need to design a human-centered economy. Revisiting the Harvard research, three key words stand out concerning the type of relationships that engender trust and lead to effective cooperation: pairwise, local, and stable.

Mutuality: We are wiser in pairs  

1. Pairwise in this context means: “occurring in pairs.” The basic building block of a community is a pair of two people connecting in a relationship: a friendship, a partnership, an employer-employee relationship, etc.

During the Industrial Revolution, company bosses diminished the importance of personal relationships to increase the productivity of the hierarchical, efficient factory floor. However, in today’s service economy we now intuitively know that relationships are central to our success. When you look deeper at the roots of professional life, the word 'company' comes from the Latin words 'com', meaning 'together', and 'panis' meaning 'bread.' Before the machine age, partners did business over a meal. Did we lose something human in our drive for performance and efficiency that we need to rediscover?

Returning to an earlier age, Aristotle described ideal relationships as “a mutual returning of love." He also said they were “a mutual choosing of what is good and pleasant.” To be successful, build your company or organization on a shared pursuit of the good, the true, and the beautiful, a shared purpose. Companies need to articulate a clear purpose and then build a community of stakeholders (customers, employees, investors, partners, etc.), break bread together and band together in collective action to deliver on this purpose. Profitability is one goal within a larger context of this purpose. Ethical action in service of this purpose builds credibility and demonstrates the responsibility of the corporation. Promises made and kept to these most important stakeholders prove your purpose and build the reservoir of trust needed for future collective action.

Locality: Everyone belongs in a community

2. Local means that your professional relationships exist in a physical reality, a place. Imagine the people that you interact with on a daily basis. Most of these people are online, but you deal with them face-to-face everyday. There is an opportunity for richness and presence in these interactions. As professionals, we need to understand our local community. We need to help cultivate a shared sense of history, landscape, culture, and memory. These elements give the locality its uniqueness and strength. For too long, corporations have been unconscious of this reality and have imported a standardized, homogenized global culture into local areas. Over time, it kills the soul of a place and destroys the sense of identity that makes that place worth caring about. This leads to a slow decomposition of what sociologists call “social capital”: the trust and cohesion necessary for cooperation.

What does this have to do with performance? The Harvard Business School conducted a study of 180 companies to explore the relationship between community engagement, sustainability, and performance. It found that the companies with strong community engagement practices significantly outperformed their competitors over the long-term in both the stock market and accounting performance. 

The study concluded that “a more engaged workforce, a more secure license to operate, a more loyal and satisfied customer base, better relationships with stakeholders, greater transparency, a more collaborative community, and a better ability to innovate may all be contributing factors to this potentially persistent superior performance in the long-term.”

Unfortunately, many corporations wait until a crisis hits to engage their local community. This is the worst time to build relationships and typically further the relational breakdown at a local level.

Stability: Build communities for the long haul  

3. Stable connotes a longer time scale and a sense of commitment long beyond a transaction or a tweet. Returning to Aristotle, “stable relationships demand time and trust. One cannot have a large number of relationships.” 

Dr. Robin Dunbar would agree. Dunbar, a professor at Oxford university, studied the relationship between our brains and social connections. According to his research, humans can only maintain about 150 stable relationships at a time.  

Bill Gore, the CEO of W.L. Gore & Associates, knew this truth about human nature in his gut. He was the innovative maker of Gore-Tex fabric used in many popular outdoor brands. Gore would not allow the staff at any of his factories to exceed 150 people. If it grew beyond this number he would create another, self-contained factory next to it. He knew that people needed to know each other on a first name basis. Gore & Associates used this philosophy to build innovative online customer communities and to grow the business into a successful 10,000 person, $3.2 billion company. Gore's success is a perfect case study of an organization that scaled trust through communities. 

If we want to build trust with customers, constituents, and other stakeholders we need to get back to the basics of building long-term relationships in our local communities. Don't wait. Start building now.