 been talking a lot about trust and I'd love to roll back to when I first kind of naively started thinking about trust and then I started comparing trust with trustworthiness and I ended up being kind of binary about this where where trust became you know the brand nine out of ten doctors recommend most and here is an old ad for cigarettes there's plenty of them you can find online including Ronald Reagan pitching Chesterfields and it was like well of course they can't be trusted and it isn't so much that cigarette makers didn't know that it might be harmful it's just that there's really a lot of lying that goes on and advertising and the trustworthiness is really about your actions in particular your actions in crisis and a reasonable example here is the Tylenol crisis and how the maker of Tylenol not only pulled all the Tylenol off the shelves very quickly but then redesigned bottles and took a series of steps pretty quickly and in fact as the victim of a crisis turned out to have earned a lot of trustworthiness over the crisis through the crisis this is the opposite of what we could say about Volkswagen these days where it's increasingly clear that their diesel conspiracy went all the way to the top and that they were been lying through their teeth all sorts of scandal and yet they're busy advertising and just sort of making their way through the crisis so if being trustworthy is the goal that means you need to act well over time because trustworthy is earned through actions just saying hey trust me is something you can advertise for that's interesting so then then I started thinking well you know there's a difference between being trustworthy and untrustworthy and I'm an optimist so for me most people organizations governments whatever start as trustworthy and then they fall from grace by screwing something up by overcharging by losing my data by ripping me off by lying by by screwing in the commons any number of things and it's perfectly legitimate to be a pessimist and to have everybody start as untrustworthy and maybe earn their way up to being trustworthy that's totally legit the thing is that even when you are completely trustworthy it doesn't really change your relationship and here i'm talking about companies being perfectly trustworthy they could be open with about everything they do they could be really using fair trade and a whole series of things and it doesn't necessarily make them that much different to you they might be preferable as a vendor but we really haven't shifted the relationship so then i started thinking well there's a place above this fray which is different and i call it being a trusted ally it means that we are busy pulling on the rope together it means that we are on the same side of this and maybe i can use a metaphor to explain this notion of trusted ally a little bit uh if you're um if you've got the curtains drawn in front of your organization there's really no reason to trust you and you might pull open the curtains in which case you might become trustworthy and that would be a great thing but if you pull me behind the curtain take me backstage show me what you have show me all the tools you have show me the data you've collected on me on everybody maintaining privacy between us but say how might we hack your health together how might we hack your wealth together all those sorts of things that's being a trusted ally now there's a lot more to this and it's a really aspirational position i think it's really easy to say you're a trusted ally much much harder to live that life but that's where thinking on trust has taken me it's taken me at lots of other places including design from trust and what if we trusted you and a few other things but um that's it for for this piece this video is part of a larger work on trust which is part of a larger thesis about the relationship economy i'm jerry mckalski and please subscribe here if you like this or go to jerry mckalski.com and you will see more things like it thanks very much for listening