Trust and the future: How to build trust in the future?
Frank Pruvost, Group ESC Lille
In spite of a wide research stream, trust remains a major issue for contemporaneous organisations and managers. Among the main questions raised, one is still crucial: how to build trust. If literature provides precise analyses of the phenomena, if practitioners have proposed some principles and techniques to develop trust, in general and between individuals, however, generating and developing trust still appear to be a huge challenge.
Why is this question so important? Why is it a major issue to address in the future? What kind of alternative solutions could we propose? The objective of this exploratory paper is to discuss the importance of trust development in the near future and possible new alternative solutions to help managers building trust in their organisations.
First, we will show how trust is, by nature and definition, to be related to the perspective of future. By uncovering some of the links between trust and the future, we will progressively focus on the “trust relationship” in the contemporaneous context. Due to the increasing part of uncertainty (in social life and relational contexts) and opportunistic behaviours, trust has become a central contemporaneous human challenge. Moreover, it seems particularly difficult to have an influence on its creation and evolution. Based on this discussion, we will show that there is and will be in the future a fundamental need for trust. We observe today the lack of trust linked to modern contexts and ideologies; the evolution of society might even increase this need for trust.
In a second part we will examine, on a critical point of view, current ways developed to build trust and their limits. We will show that the main theoretical and practical proposals are very limited because they don't question enough the ideological framework from which they emerge. That will lead us to see that trust itself cannot be produced and manipulated directly; only some conditions can be set so that trust might appear.
To overcome these limits, we propose, in a third section, new ways to help building trust in the future, based on some critical literature that suggest paradoxical actions and unexpected behaviours, to think out of the box. We will particularly insist on experiential learning and new pedagogies that could provide original and powerful tools to create conditions for trust to emerge and develop.
Finally, in a fourth section, to illustrate our proposal we will take the example of "acting techniques" that are sometimes used in management seminars to enhance trust. This method consists in training managers and employees in organisations by using programs originally developed in "acting schools" to train "actors" for the stage. This method provides powerful tools to work on trust in organisations. It also emphasizes some crucial principles, as regards trust building, such as the importance to set clear rules or the role of self-confidence, that are consistent with the proposed solutions derived from a critical perspective. This illustration supports our proposal and opens new perspectives for researchers and practitioners, to make trust present in the future.