 Excellent. So this is a design from Trust Call on Friday, January 18th, 2019. Our guest is Toby Lowe from the UK, from Newcastle University, but which business school? So I now work from Northumbria University. Northumbria, sorry, yes. Newcastle Business School. Newcastle Business School. And the nomenclature is difficult, but there we are. Like, because there's also a Newcastle University right next door. Excellent. Good. So now that that's clear. We have a really fascinating topic. I will let Toby take us into the topic in a second. And just to frame things, Design from Trust is a way of looking at trust that is kind of kind of real. It showed up for me a couple of years ago when I realized looking at institutions around us that most of our modern institutions, which we often assume are as good as they could be designed, are designed for mistrust of the average person. Our compulsory education system is called compulsory because we can compel you to put your child in school, whereupon we immediately put them in lockstep with other kids of the same age and sort of almost gave them away from kids of different ages, even though we suspect somewhere in the back of our lines that it's a pretty good thing to learn or teach kids other ages and so forth. And that becomes a special thing, mentoring or tutoring, instead of just the way that schools them. A whole series of other ways in which mistrust creates scarcity and also in which mistrust replaces intrinsic motivation with extrinsic rewards. And I think that's a key piece of the conversation we'll have here. And with that, let me turn it to Toby to sort of unpack the call. Let me add that half the people on the call here have been collaborating with Toby on fleshing out these ideas. And so this is in some sense a practitioner's call, not just kind of an intro call. So Toby, take it away. Thank you, Jerry. So where should I start? I'll just say a little bit about the kind of background to the work and the kind of link, I think, between working in complexity and the need for trust. So my background is I used to be a voluntary sector and not for profit chief executive. I got frustrated with how funding and performance management landscape was working. And the landscape that we were being asked to work within, particularly when the public bodies that we started working with adopted the kind of outcomes based accountability framework, because in our experience, kind of long story short, when they adopted that outcomes based accountability framework, it created a situation where people stopped telling the truth to each other. So I thought how we must be able to do better with this, better than this funding and performance management. And so I did, I began a relationship with the business school at Newcastle University. They asked me to do some research on this. And we found that basically outcomes based performance management fails to work in complex environments. If you try and hold organizations accountable for producing outcomes, effectively, you're holding them accountable for things they don't control. And so they learn to manage what they can control, which is the production of data. So, and there's just, there's a ton of research studies that back this up. So it doesn't matter in what policy context in which country, if people adopt outcomes based performance management approaches like payment by results, I think you call it payment for success in the United States, it creates the drivers for gaming. So what could we do differently? So in order to kind of work out what an alternative looks like, we asked some of the organizations and charitable foundations, some public sector commissioners, people who have resources to spend in order to achieve social good. So we asked them what their experience of and response to complexity is. And so we asked them, how do they respond to the fact that people's lives are complex, that everyone's life is different. And so if you're trying to create positive outcomes in their life, you need to respond to the variety of that. How do you respond to the intertwined nature of the problems, the social challenges that we face. So the fact that homelessness isn't just an issue about housing, it's also frequently an issue about mental health problems, and maybe substance misuse and domestic violence and, and, and, and how do you respond to the fact that the number of people and organizations involved in helping people to kind of get their lives on track. There's such a huge variety of organizations, public sector organizations, private sector organizations, voluntary sector organizations, civil society, friendship groups and networks. It's a whole tangled mess of people intervening in different ways. And if you, if you want to kind of visualize what that complex system looks like that creates an outcomes in people's lives, I'll just see if I can paste a little figure into the chat thing that illustrates that. Apparently I can't. If you can't paste you can also screen share. So if you want to try that. How do I do that? If mouse mouse over the screen where you see all of us and then at the bottom it says share. Gallery view. If you mouse right over the, over the screen, you'll get a menu that pops up below. The menu that's not visible when your mouse is not over the screen. Think about bigger. Gallery view. Mouse over. Not showing up for you. There we go. There we go. Share my screen. A small technology triumph. I love it. There we are. Share. I was going to try mind control next, but I'm glad I did that. So what you see here is the systems map of obesity, which shows, it was a work done by the UK government in 2007, shows all the different 108 different factors that they mapped in producing the outcome of obesity. So whether people are obese or not. And you'll see it contains in it. You can't see any of the individual factors because they're too small. You see them summed up in things like early life experiences, food production and supply, macro-aconic drivers, education, technology, nature of work, healthcare, all these different factors. These all these contribute to making up the outcome of whether people are obese or not. If you look in the bottom right hand corner of that system map, you'll see kind of four factors associated with healthcare and treatment options. So if you're a funder and commissioner, those are the things that you would generally fund or commission. But if you do that on a payment by results or payment for success basis, basically what you're saying is you're trying to hold those people at that tiny part of the system accountable for the behavior of the system as a whole. And what you're trying to do is hold people accountable for things they don't control. And if you try and hold people accountable for things they don't control, you fail because they learn to manage what they can control, which is the production of data. So that kind of payment by success mechanism, if you operate that in a complex environment, it just turns everyone's job into the production of good-looking data rather than doing the job at hand. So how do I stop sharing? Pause? Share? I put the top, yep. So having diagnosed that in complex environments you need something else, we spoke with a number of these funders and commissioners who had decided to do things differently. And we asked them what their experience of and response was to complexity. And when we asked them that question, they started to talk about relationships and trust. And some of the people we asked that question to and gave us that response are on this call right now. So you can kind of get their different experiences from this. And basically what they seem to say is that because in a complex, one of the features of a complex environment is unpredictability. So you can't set performance targets in advance and know what the impact on that system is going to be. So you can't have that control mindset that is the paradigm on which almost all performance management is based on. So you need to let go of the illusion of control if you're going to promote positive performance of kind of public services and other social interventions in complex environments. And so what enables those with resources to distribute to let go of the illusion of control seems to be the idea of trust. And when we dug into what that means for people and essentially it's trust in the intrinsic motivation of those who do the work. So we as funders, we as commissioners trust that the people, the organizations that we're working with are intrinsically motivated to do a good job. They don't need the extrinsic motivation of reward and punishment in order to do the right thing. And that trust opens up the idea that it's learning that becomes the engine for performance improvement. So if you want to enable people to get better at what they do, you create learning environments where people's desire for mastery, people's desire to achieve a higher purpose creates the drivers which enables them to improve their performance. Then as an organization, it's really important what kind of learning mechanisms you build around those things. And so this is, I think, where the kind of design, there's really interesting potential to bring together the design from trust stuff with this stuff about learning as the engine for performance improvement because what I'm interested in is how those two sets of ideas fit together. So what are the learning mechanisms that enable people to build on trust as a mechanism for performance improvement? And so I feel like that's probably enough by way of introduction because there are now a number of people and organizations on this call who can talk much more eloquently than I can about how they use these as a set of practices to support their organizational work. So we got Richard from the Tudor Trust, John from the Whitman Institute, Gary from Plymouth Council can all talk a little bit about how they do this stuff. That's fantastic. Tobi, that's like really a sparkling stellar intro to the topic. Maybe I'll pause for a second to see. I mean, I'm on board, but I want to see who has questions here. Questions about what got presented so far. Don't take us any deeper in because we want to sort of open up the topic a little bit more. But anybody have a question right now? To clarify what Tobi's presented. We're good. Okay, you can also click on there's a raise hand function in zoom and if you do that I will I will notice it so on from there. So let me do a tiny piece on design from trust with a with a footnote first I typed it into the chat but there is a whole bunch of knowledge in the room here about mapping complex problems. Kevin Jones who's on the call had a company and a project called Ziggy XI GI 15 years ago Kevin. I don't know. I don't remember how long ago 1520 years ago. That was busy mapping social problems and trying to figure out who was doing what for whose benefit where and who had invested in whom all those kinds of things right what what are the funding links, what are the problem nexus next I nexus is right. Kevin you want to describe it for a sec. Yeah, we really depicted the relationships in a marketplace. So who funded who with what kind of money and what did they produce. And in this emerging market of social enterprise and impact investment people loved it and put a lot of things into it. And one of the things we did that was kind of unique happens you know people do is that we went from the personal to the organizational and back and so you can see an investor their nonprofit boards their board memberships with other people and those sorts of things. And it was great it was it was unfortunately before there was really a market. You were early. It was too early. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Closed it down and got covered by spam. Nice. And separately from that I'm I'm in extremely current conversations like one happened yesterday with a bunch of people who are doing system mapping around thorny problems like food supply and so forth using a tool called kumu. Which some of you may know Toby your public familiar with it, but I have gotten to know some black belt kumu users who do these beautiful rich system diagrams and part of what we're looking at is, in fact, we're putting together a proposal to get funding to do mapping For example, of the Columbia River Gorge area from a food systems perspective, and then from other, you know, other kinds of systems as well, and then to see how this how the map actually helps people do. I think some of the stuff that we're going to talk about here in the rest of the call. So that's that's a super interesting piece and then let me do a screen share of my own for a second because I've been using this tool called the brain for 21 years. And by way of explanation of design from trust and all those kinds of things here are a bunch of examples of what I call the relationship economy in action. So there's a democracy democrat. So for example, there's a thing called workplace democracy, which is an umbrella term for a whole series of different things that have to do with trust of your employees. So we don't actually trust our employees. We most companies are autocratic hierarchical. Most people are on the clock think Fordism Taylorism. That is still really like companies in the 80s and 90s figured out how to squeeze out all of the slack from their companies get rid of all the assistance, etc, and make everybody do 120% of their job. So there's a whole series of initiatives from worker coops to liberated companies to holocracy and a bunch of other initiatives that are examples of trust at work. There's something called unschooling helps when you spell it properly. So there's something called unschooling, which is sort of the opposite of this compulsory education system, which is trusting your that your children are curious and trusting that they're trying to figure out their role in the world. And figuring out how to scaffold their learning because they're born curious little kids are learning machines and we kind of forgot that, right. So I can come back to design from trust in different ways and and partly what I'm really interested in is how to create a practice of design from trust that anybody could pick up and go use at a corporate level at a social impact nonprofit level and at a personal level because I think that there's also designed from trust is very much about personal attitude that there's a there's a saying from open source and and other places that that really encapsulates nicely what designed from this perspective about which is assume good intent and assume good intent is lovely because assume good intent doesn't say, hey, be like, you know, be blind that everybody showing up has good intent it doesn't say that it says assume good faith as a start as an as an opening salvo. That usually leads you really good places. And the problem is that a bunch of people in the world believe that people are born evil, and therefore need to be constrained and ruled. I think I think partly what we're saying here is, if you cross your fingers, you know, close your eyes and begin with a gesture of trust, you get to really good places. What I've discovered is, that's what I have here under examples of the relationship economy in action, hundreds of movements around the world that have discovered these principles separately on their own and have actually applied them, which is why I want to turn it back to you, Toby, to introduce whoever you'd like from the people you've been working with to tell us some stories about how that what this looks like on the ground. Yeah. So, kind of in, it's been my privilege over the last two years or so to start talking in depth with organizations who in the kind of language that I had originally used adopted kind of complexity informed ways of working different organizations you have their own language around this, and there are all in different ways using the prince using this idea of let's start from trust as a way to, as a starting point for our assumptions about the relationship between us with money to distribute and the people who we might support to achieve social good. I suspect it would be natural for me to start by introducing john because john and the Whitman Institute and they brand what they do as trust based philanthropy. So, john would you like to say something about that. Sure, thanks Toby. And I'll just try and keep it brief because I know there's a lot of us on the call. Whitman Institute is a foundation in San Francisco founded in 88 but we started making grants in 2005 and I was the only full time staff for over a decade now I'm the co executive director there's two of us full time staff. We have a portfolio that's kind of multi issue based but it's around advancing equity and social justice. But funding work that we think really lifts up the importance of dialogue and relationship building and linking that to processes of community and civic engagement. And journalism and media leadership development a whole human rights whole pound of issues. And where our, when we first started doing grant making, there were just some practices we inherently did we didn't call them anything but it was unrestricted funding was a pillar. We're supporting you, you know how best to spend the money. Here it is. And we found just with that step. It was important to Jerry your point. It was starting from an implicit place of trust, rather than distrust which is often how nonprofits interpret their beginning relationships with foundations where there's some okay what's the proposal what's the control what's the reporting going to be, and that most of the funding is project based funding, rather than unrestricted funding. So right from the beginning. That was a core part of our approach as was support over time, making multi or commitments, streamlining reporting not requiring the usual things and having an invitation to relationship. So in 2012 we made the decision as a foundation to spend out as a foundation in 2022. So one of our first things we thought we would do is, is helping inform how we looked at our, our final chapter was we contracted with the Center for effective philanthropy to do what's called the grantee perception report. Standardized survey compared to other foundations where you get anonymous feedback from the people you're supporting. So one one big learning from that it was very affirming and that we were kind of off the charts in a positive way. In terms of how we did our work and our grant making and our relationships with the people we supported. We had an open ended question we could that we were able to ask. And so we asked people, their ideas about how we might best leverage our resources, as we looked to spend out. And it came through kind of loud and clear, people thought we should advocate for what and how we find. And then what was interesting and informed our work going forward is CEP said, but we also want to highlight this comment that keeps coming up and people's are threads that keeps coming up and people's comments. And that that's how important it is that they feel trusted by you. So when we heard that feedback, combined with what we were actually hearing from a lot of people that we were supporting working in communities working across issues across difference, how important trust was before they could do anything. We took that feedback, combined with this urge to advocate within philanthropy and named our practices as trust based philanthropy. And so we these and what's interesting, none of the things we are advocating for our new people have been making the case for these for a long time but many of them prove stubbornly resistant to widespread change. So what we have found in the last couple years is that people and this is anecdotal and small but our own experience is that people are responding and have responded to the framing of trust. And so what's happening for us now is we're looking to our spend out and how we're thinking of our legacy is we're committing to helping contribute to an informal network of foundations and nonprofits who are both practicing in this way that we feel embodies trust and also advocating for it within philanthropy. So we have now over the past year, kind of that first follower thing, we had two other foundations who kind of who said, and these were newer EEDs, we want to use that language and framing to talk about how we do our work, and we want to advocate along with you. So we have now started what we're just we're calling the trust based philanthropy network. And it's kind of a community of practice of funders who are both practicing these principles in their own foundations and everybody has some different ways of doing it. And we want to learn we're committed to being ambassadors and advocates and sharing what we're learning there. So we now have five foundations in this network based on a meeting we did in September. And we are doing a similar meeting in New York, the end of February. And so where we're at at the moment is is trying to nurture and grow this both practitioner and advocacy network around trust based philanthropy. And so that's why I was really excited to hear about Jerry what you were doing with this and I have to ask you, were you involved in the Seattle design festival. I was not check that out. And it was all around trust and designing for trust. I mentioned that because after this September meeting that we had with foundations one of the people in our group, he said, Well, I was in Seattle and just by happenstance walk down this kind of up this pop up art installation around designing from trust so so that I will I'll just end there we have found that approaching our work from trust and I like the distinction you make Jerry of designing from trust not for trust. That that has been very powerful and in our work. And I think maybe it's because we're in such times of massive distrust on so many levels, people are, they're being invited in with trust and I think it grounds what can be maybe sound academic or to intellectual. It grounds it in a relational frame that I think people can respond to and and so anyway so that's and so we were thrilled when Toby contacted us now a couple years ago for the report. And we're just in this mode of wanting to connect and network as much as we can to just help build a wider movement around making this case. Thank you john and I think kind of want to bring that into a UK context now and maybe invite Richard to talk a little bit about the practices of the Tudor Trust, which is a UK based charitable foundation that shares some of that philosophy with Whitman Institute, although it wouldn't badge itself as that kind of trust based philanthropy at the moment. And Susan, Susan has raised her hand can we can we pause for a second and take Susan's question and then come back. Go ahead Susan. You are muted and presently unmuted how about that. There we are. Yeah, just just a quick question so and maybe this just goes back to Toby. Toby's interested in why he's here. Have you consciously done any documentation of the practice of becoming a developing the practice of the incoming I know this is ridiculous but the meta the meta thing right because that's a real developing I'm thinking on behalf of Jerry as well because that's a place where I've had lots of experience in developing practice for design but but anyway just wondering what you're doing about that part. Yeah so we're doing now in the UK we started a research project funded by the Tudor Trust thanks again Richard which looks at trying to do two things basically to try and deepen our understanding of what complexity informed funding and commissioning looks like which you could read as a short hand for trust based funding and commissioning. And also what the journeys look like that enable organizations to get there. So we've just started that as a research process we've been working alongside organizations working this way for for about six months now and and we're about to publish a second report kind of follow up to that whole New World's report which describes kind of our learning so far on deepening that understanding of what the practice looks like and what the journeys are that enable the organization to get there so if all goes well we'll publish that February, March time. Thank you. So back to you in the booth Toby if you want to play air traffic controller for your guests. Yes so as I was saying before kind of moving this from a US foundation context to a UK foundation context and kind of wanted just to invite Richard to maybe say a little bit about how trust features in how the tutor trust does its work. Yeah sure. Thanks Toby. It's fantastic to be part of this conversation. I'm really excited to hear about the the philanthropy network. That sounds really helpful because it does feel a bit like a lonely weird journey I think for a lot of people trying to pursue what feels like such a strongly felt instinct but hasn't had any intellectual framing and I want to just sort of for from a UK perspective maybe for doing exactly that and making sort of a more justified and evidence based for something that felt absolutely instinctive and human. So the tutor trust is a family trust it was set up in the 50s 1950s. Most of the trustees are still family members but sort of third generation but they take their tasks really seriously and it's a strongly relational enterprise altogether. The trustees meet every four weeks usually for a day and a half just to look at all of the applications that are coming in that all of which have been worked out by members of staff as well. So within the organization there's a lot of dialogue there's a lot of listening there's a lot of relating. And the the moment when they took a decisive step in this direction was about 12 years ago when after a strategic review they had a just an honest conversation whenever they said look we've got these program outcomes our program aims that we're talking about but we just get this feeling because I should say trust works primarily with small community level organizations working very much in an embedded neighborhood context or community of interest context. They said look these people are just distorting themselves to fit into our processes and our boxes. And we have this feeling this instinct that life's more complicated than that and that most of the people we feel are most in need are falling between the gaps of all the things that we're trying to specify. If we're trying to do something around health and they're reading something else around education and maybe doing something else around skills, the people who quite often are most in need of the support are not falling into any one of these categories they're falling across all of them. So partly they wanted to work with multiple needs. Which without even saying it was just having an instinct and getting a bit woke if you like. And they very quickly had the thought. We got rid of all of our programs that comes. What if we just ask organizations to tell us. What to do is not our terms and share with us what they, yeah, what their vision of the world is and what difference in their terms they think they're trying to make or they can make. And so immediately they changed the priority and it came from trust that the people that they were trying to fund knew more about the needs than Tudor as a funded it. And that what Tudor needed to do was to listen and to try and really hear what organizations were saying and learn from the organizations about the contacts in which they were working. And then, oh, sorry, I'm cutting in and I see I've got a bit of a stable. So what I'm saying is you can see that this was sort of in a way quite an instinctive journey, but along the way they came across some of the key components that we've been talking about and the Toby's been sending the force. One, the world is very complicated. Two, in order to do good, you need to build that into your understanding of social action. Secondly, that in order to do anything sensible, you need to trust people who are able to make the best judgment. So you're not using your judgment as a funder or commissioner, you're trusting the judgments of the people that you are backing. And then finally, because it's going to be a journey because it's complicated, you can't foresee how things will work out. So in order to do it, you've got to trust the good intent and the good judgment of the people that you're backing so that your relationship with organizations as you go forward through the grant, through the course of the grant is relational. It's not bureaucratic, you're not asking people to report certain outcomes at certain points. You just have an open line with them all the way through so you're just hearing how things are going so you can adjust as they adjust. That's why they find themselves by instinct into trust based practice. So I posted something to the chat earlier that is all just a hunch of mine. But I'm wondering if it's if it holds up in practice, which is that the larger the pot of money that's on offer for fixing some social problem, the more likely that honeypot of money attracts a bunch of people who understand how to extract money from large budgets. And the less it attracts people who really have a deep understanding of the problem and would like to work to figure out the problem. So there's this weird, when you try to throw a lot of money at solving something that it tends to distort it and screw up the process of fixing it. Is that bear out. And I, I absolutely recognize the scenario and that's something that you just have to wrestle with, but they, they just have a funny and interesting or not really. So whenever they're looking at grant applications, if it's looking at some, unless it's real, they have they say we're trying to find the real deal. And I think. The developing their own language. So they're not, they're not so. And Richard. My apologies, Richard, your sound volume, your volume just went down for some reason and you start, we started getting a little cross talk. So there's like gremlins or aliens on your lines somehow. Do you have, do you have your phones you could put in? Yeah, that might, that might, that might help. It might be echo canceling algorithms that are having a day a field day with us. I don't know. Toby, go ahead. And Gary, can I just add one thing to what your question, because I think this is something that is comes up, I think a lot right now in the field and there's a lot of frustration from smaller from people working in community on the ground, more grassroots, especially often communities of color. And they will see these big amounts of money and the big funders. It's there. It's like, well, we want to support what's happening in community, but you're too small to handle our money. You're, you're in a basically, we don't trust you to handle significant resources. So you you get this entrance structure of big funding big big institutions look okay we have to find somebody who can handle our big grant. And so you set up as you're saying this very strange system that makes it really hard for these community based groups to really grow and share their expertise because they're constantly in this cycle of having to prove themselves. And it's real catch 22. So I just think you raise a very good point. And can I can that the was absolutely recognising that that that kind of point about the question that you raise about is there an inverse relationship between kind of trust and size of the money on offer and also want to offer a slightly different perspective because in some respects, it's easy to see this kind of trust based practice within a charitable foundations context, partly because in some respects, the governance of charitable foundations is easier. If a small group of people decide that they're going to distribute resources in this way, they can just do it. So the trustees decide we're going to fund this way. They decide to fund that way. And also, and that kind of inevitably lends a kind of size and scale to the amount of resources that people are talking about. But one of the things that we were really interested to discover when we did this work is that it can apply as much to the public sector. As to the as to the Charitable Foundation, the not for profit sector or the distribution of resources from charitable foundations. And one of the really exciting things was finding public sector people who are distributing resources in a trust based way, and therefore, and also distributing larger quantities of resources in a trust based way. And this is my cue to introduce Gary. Gary, do you want to say a little bit about your experience in this work? Can you hear me? Yeah, so, so I work for Plymouth City Council. So Plymouth is a post industrial Navy town in far Southwest of the UK. It's about 300 miles from London. It's a very poor city. And historically has always kind of been underfunded by sent by central government. So it's always had financial challenge. So our kind of process started in 2012. So in 2012, the big lottery, which is an enormous funder in the UK is funded from the National Lottery percentage of the money is is put into this essentially charitable funder, but it's actually state run. They had a project they invited 15 cities, and they were going to fund 12 so really high potential for success and they were going to fund at a basically a million pounds a year for 10 years. So they were really encouraging a kind of broad, a broad collaborative approach to build a bit. So, so we Julie did an enormous three months long consultation where we spoke to about 700 or 800 people using services, their relatives, the carers, we spoke to groups, especially one to one. People people with lived experience designed a lot of the questions we asked. And lo and behold, it told us essentially what everyone here is saying that and really what we already knew that the way we did things was. So in the UK, we have a thing called Purchase of Provider, which is based on the new public management model, where I the commissioner four times a year I performance management services once in the three years might essentially chuck a watch of cash on the table and watch all the services fight over it. I who might be very inexperienced in a particular area, decide what's important in that area, despite the fact that people I'm commissioning might have 30 or 40 years commitment and experience and absolutely crazy system so so we essentially prepared a bid, which was a trust based bid about how we were going to We're going to have a confessional phase. And then we were going to move into this really really collaborative trust based way of funding where where commissioner was on an equal footing. You know we agreed as our kind of match funding to this process that we would as a as a local government, we would essentially devolve power and budgets to two providers and we would just be one voice amongst many in how that money was spent. And we, we, the lottery made lots of encouraging noises we submitted bid and we didn't get it. And actually that was the best thing that could have happened. So, on reflection, I think what our group would say is, had we won that bid. And it would have entrenched the past, the, the, the services that are, you know, they're really well adapted some of the large national providers are really well adapted to bidding and securing funding as Richard's just outlined really. So, so we had this absolutely unprecedented decade of authority of austerity. We failed to get this bid and yet we had this, this really rich consultation which basically told us we, we had to change. And so we decided to, to continue the process and so at the time that started I worked in the National Health Service and then through government realisation, we, we in public health and moved into local government, our local political leaders were Labour parties essentially a social democratic party and they wanted to make the city what they called a cooperative city. So they wanted to promote local kind of place based small scale solutions in the city. And they say essentially they were casting around looking for something concrete. And I was able to say well actually I've got this thing on the shelf. So this was five years ago. I've got this thing which is ready to go. And we've only just ordered to contract five years later. And so what they did was they essentially said, okay, here's here's an experimental bubble, and you can, you can do, you can do your thing. So, so our topic is complex needs. So that's people with mental health substance issues, offending domestic violence and homelessness or housing serious housing problems. So there are 29 services and there are five separate mission is so to national health service commissioners and three local authority commissioners. And so we went on this, this kind of extraordinary journey of it kind of really started with, so we, you know, we suddenly we the the oppressors were coming to the oppressed and saying, hey, we've changed you know it's all it's all going to be great from now on and they were Yeah, okay. So we essentially had to go through a process of truth and reconciliation where even though you know you might never have been the guy that behave like that you have to sit there and listen to them tell you what a shit you've been over the years and how you've destroyed their service or you've made things impossible for them or And fine, you know, so you get to a place where you've done that kind of truth and reconciliation minutes about moving on. So, so we funded An academic year of systems leadership for everybody. And we did lots of Lots of what we could would now call storytelling but you might call it ethnographic approaches or appreciative inquiry where essentially we we listen to each other and we listen to people using services we were really interested in why people come to work. What they like about being at work and similarly why people what people like in their services we found some really fundamental mismatches. I think largely driven by a market sized approach where where the kind of things we were valuing you know the production of data as to be described. You realize how meaningless they are to people that that use services and actually to people that working services. So this kind of joint kind of process of discovery and learning and to cut a long story short because there are a lot of people on the call so so essentially we decided to let what's called an alliance contracts when alliance is a is a legal partnership agreements. This is a this is a 75 million pound contract. So it's a 10 year long contract. That's kind of an unprecedented timescale in recent years. And the way it works is The other advantage I must say of an alliance contract is what's happened in the UK over the last 20 or 30 years is small local organizations have really been out competed by the kind of super marketization of social care. And so there are lots of national providers with bid writing teams and and you often meet this thing which has already been described where they will say you're too small to have some money. So parts of the advantage for us of supporting the alliance contract was it enables really quite small providers to to aggregate together and and do some skill sharing and demonstrate that they can handle those sums of money. So the way the alliance works is that there are we're all signatures to the contract and commissioners as well and commissioners essentially become part of this unanimous group unanimous decision making group where we have essentially all the government money has been put into this so it's I don't retain any special control over that. I don't I don't retain any any magic cheese. You know I'm just one of the one of the group and but because we spent so long understanding each other's motivation. There's something really important for us or has been for us in achieving changes is witnessing stuff together so you know you pair off to very disparate people and you go and interview. I don't know a carer or a family or whatever and they tell you stuff which is really moving and then later on when you want that person to stop doing something. Would you stop doing you can kind of refer back to this this jointly witnessed experience which moved you and and it makes it very difficult then for people to take an interest position. They also begin to see that actually this is a really complex system and and they're only a tiny part of it and it's much better if they kind of open up. Yeah so so kind of five years later we we let the contract last week and and the boss said so that's that done and I said well actually that's only it's just about the stars. It's just got us to the start line really and she said so say so what's going to happen and I said well I don't I don't know but good things are going to happen because we've got this understanding and and everyone's really committed and we're already in the process we've already seen huge improvements to to the experience of people using services. You know so we speak to large groups of them every year and they tell us it's things are much better. I can't hear you Jerry. I forgot to unmute myself. I want to jump in real quick for a second because Trey it turns out has to go to a different call at the top of the hour and I wanted to bring her into the conversation because she's proposing a super interesting project in Columbia which I described very briefly in the chat tray over to you in the booth and you you're still muted. Jerry can you just touch on briefly what you want me to talk about because I could talk for 50 minutes and I have five. Exactly. I think I think given where this conversation is aiming which part of what your project is is is doing sort of is relevant just bring it in but partly I'm saying this because Trey one kind of a competition for a social venture to read rethink redesign that the judicial system in Columbia and her approach her team's approach came in with deep listening as the starting point and as the project team members were out talking to judges and other people in the judicial system. One judge replied you know we've had lots of consultants come through here and they all promise something and don't deliver and you're the first one who's been listening and built credibility and trust right on the ground right there. It was a really simple thing but very profound so I think if you can sort of riff on that and pull in any other aspects of it that you want to that that makes sense in this conversation. Sure thank you Jerry and I appreciate this conversation so much it makes me regret that I need to fly I will give some links as some reference afterwards if I may just to economize on time because I don't multitask so well. First of all really want to continue this conversation very much feel that there are kindred spirits here because I think oftentimes those of us who are playing in this sandbox feel alone. So I want to say thank you and and offer up my gratitude how I came into this project is is strange how I became now the leader of the project is even more strange. I do not speak Spanish whatsoever I'm Canadian I'm born and raised in Calgary Alberta Canada I'm as green as you get. So from that standpoint I was very aware that that this project if it was to proceed in in any way shape or form and right now the proceeding of it is in question and I can get into that in other conversations later. But the if it is to proceed it cannot be about a transplant it cannot be about individuals coming in and parachuting in and saying we have a solution it needs to be a pathway so that Colombians can develop something for Colombians on Colombian soil plain and simple. So even though we were brought in to in essence come in with a tech startup because that's what they were asking for they were asking for yet another expensive tech solution. To help an inefficiency within the justice system is that it became frightfully obvious that that while we could offer up a part to that that really it had to be more broad spectrum. And so what we did was we merged a methodology out of a tiny little organization out of Tucson Arizona called creating the future. Led by Hildi Gottlieb and I've been a member and a fellow of that organization for over 10 years now and they do what's called now after much evolution the catalytic thinking framework. It involves catalytic listening catalytic thinking and the catalytic decision making and catalytic action. And so in essence it involves how we're listening and how we are asking questions and coming from the place of possibility definition instead of problem definition because problem definition is actually a zero sum game. A positive plus a negative doesn't equal a positive it just brings you to zero sum. So in the introduction to doing that and in the application and just the absolutely bare bones practice I was not the one who who conducted the interviews in Colombia because I don't speak Spanish. I just sat down with two of my teammates who do one is a Colombian lawyer who actually resides in Bogota. And the other one is a gentleman from Miami who while he is American has has his family history in Colombia. And so between the two of them with just a little bit of coaching they were able to get responses that came from the heart not just from the head and it was a phenomenal experience. And so just just passing that on to say would really love to share contacts. I've already reached out Gary. I'm having a bit of a hard time finding you on LinkedIn. So if you want to check me out and you're not on LinkedIn. Okay that would be why LinkedIn isn't usually my go to. So I have reached out to a couple of you already and would very much like to continue the conversation so and make connections. So thank you so much for for the time and I'm very grateful and thank you. Thank you and I have a feeling we have a follow up call to do just to like think about this and come back in with the new set of questions and see who else shows up for the conversation. So Tray thank you for being here and for that download. Toby go ahead. And so I had a couple of questions spring to mind. I mean I've probably heard probably heard me talking off but I just from from your introduction and listening to kind of Gary and Richard and John. I mean I'm intrigued by this idea of starting by assuming good intent. And because I think that's probably a starting point for all people but I will be interested to hear to hear whether that was actually the case for people or were they making judgments of the trustworthiness of the people that they worked with. So certain people are trustworthy and others aren't and if so what those trustworthiness judgments were based on. So is it a we assume good intent and trust everyone or are we making a set of discernments about who's trustworthy and what isn't and who isn't brother. And what's the relationship between all all that and any kind of trust building work that we do because Gary one way to hear the story that Gary's talked about is that essentially they did they have done five years of trust building work. So I'm just curious about the relationship between that idea of assuming good intent making trustworthiness discernment judgments and building trust purposefully within a set of people. So Toby I believe that you're asking that question to the whole group not just of myself. So I'm just very quickly going to pause myself I need to run to the door and I'll be right back. Thank you. So my question was also to John and to Richard and to Gary and anyone else who wants to jump in. So. So I would say we started from the position of everyone was trustworthy everyone had good intentions. But I think over the course of the process you begin to realize that I'm not sure necessarily about trust. Some people don't want to do this. Some people are really good at the old way they get loads of money from the old way and they really don't want to jeopardize that by playing your game. And we took the view as long as they were open about that that was fine because they can you know we can subcontract stuff with them they were not saying it's the end of them. And we really encouraged people to be to be honest but there were one or two individuals rather than organizations who I mean they're really is they're really inauthentic and they're really easy to spot. And it's you just have a conversation to say look you don't you don't have to do this you can you know you could this is this is a coalition of the willing you don't you can choose to do something else that's OK. The other thing I'd say about trust for us was a really interesting thing which I actually think you captured in one of the focus groups that so we were merrily bowling along for two or two and a half years. And we we we were given a savings target because all UK local government is having all of its central grant cut between 2010 and 2020. So we had to remove half a million pounds from the system. And we basically went to the group and said we have to remove half a million pounds from the system. And we want you to tell us how to do it. And you know essentially asking Turkish to vote for Christmas. At that point there were a couple of services that said we'd rather you just tell us you just you make decision. We were no no no we were serious about this. And and essentially that they made the cuts and they were without any loss of service. So they made it they made they had such detailed knowledge of the system that they were able to find cuts in areas that made no difference to people using the service. We would not never have been able to find an on reflection. Many of the services say it was at the point that we came to them to say we have to cut the money that they realized we were really serious. This was a transformational process. We were not going to go back to the old ways. So there's the stressors kind of help move on the system. It's an opportunity to demonstrate you are you are doing what you said you would do. That's an essential kind of trust building power sharing thing. I'm back to trade since I know you have to leave the car. Thank you. Thank you. The situation that we entered into. And I will be clear that we are still in. Is that absolutely every move we make a suspect. We're dealing with a culture that has been under 65 years of civil war and has only had peace for the last two years as of November. And that peace is spotty at best. There has been challenges in the Colombian environment with private foreign interests coming in and buying off certain individuals within the justice system and within the government. It is a hotbed of distrust in so many ways. And there is a lot of if I was to be kind. I think there is a lot of desire for hope and a lot of skepticism married in with it. So one of the things that we are very aware of is that we can't get anybody to trust us. We can't it's not it's not possible. The only thing we can do is we can cultivate the conditions the environment so that individuals can of their own accord step into exploring entertaining whether or not they might could would should trust us. And really what they discover in the midst of it is that it has very little with them trusting us and has everything to do with them learning how to trust themselves again. And so when we do that the cultivation of the conditions happens by virtue of the questions that we ask them. It happens by placing them at the center of the design of how we design those conversations and how we receive the information. And there's so much more to talk about with that but I just really wanted to share that a lot of it came down to Enrique and Emerson who who were being guided remotely by me from Canada. Yeah they're glorious the individuals and willing willing to step out into the unknown. It really came back to them bringing themselves in check their motivations their desires that they needed to put their expectations 100% aside. And walk in in a principled fashion in a purposeful fashion but in a neutral fashion and and that's another whole area of of conversation. So thank you for your time and for squeezing me in and I very much look forward to finding out when the next call is so that I can book the whole time off. Thank you everyone. Appreciate it. Toby back to you wherever you'd like to take us. So I was going to ask that question the question I asked before of others so the do you start with that assuming good intent for everyone or do you make those kind of trust discernments of trustworthiness and how do you build trust between people. I'm curious to hear from from from John and Richard and others about that as well. And we've got a question from Judy and Richard raised his hand Richard wanted to go ahead and address this and then we can then we'll go to Judy. You do but your volume is still kind of low but we hear you better. But your volume is still curiously lower than it was when you started talking way back when are you properly plugged into the jack at the other end. Okay. So I'll hold it real close. You know what there's something weird that's happening because you're holding the microphone really close is not making your volume any louder so I have a suspicion that your earphones are somehow not the source of the audio mic right now. We hear you okay it's just not that loud go ahead. I think it might be an internet speed thing or something it's a bit dodgy at the minute. Very really beautifully illustrated what I was going to say which was to be you were talking about do you start off with this you know this trusting of intent and behind that there's a question really about. Is this just all the blind. The two things one first of all is trade is it's a it starts with you being trustworthy. So one of the things that you just try to spend as much time thinking about is are we being trustworthy. What are we actually doing and I guess that's what trades talking about you know what are the conditions that build trust. And actually being really clear that the people as they approach tutor might not believe that tutor is going to deliver on what it says that it really is as open as it really is as content to try and free people as possible so it's being absolutely clear that you're modeling the behaviors but not as modeling behaviors as something external and you really believe it in the signed up you've got internet motivation as well. And then I think I don't know this might be just building on your question to be well first of all, we know that trust isn't just blind trust it's actually something which is highly discriminatory. We are adjudicating between people we can trust and people we can. Now a lot of the work I've done around trust, one of the things I've been thinking in some extent based on your past records, the deliverings in the past that demonstrate by your history that you're able to continue doing those things and I think there's a lot of good in that there's a I think there's a lot of work over here and on a meal, we've done a lot of work on trust like we get down into those components really and very simple. But I'm struck that the situation that most of us are finding ourselves in is future oriented and about things you don't know. So the past is something we can all track and we can build up a case but how do you what new things you need to factor in whenever you're trying to trust someone essentially to hold their hand in a dark and unknown territory. Most of the complex environments are places that are requiring new solutions. It's interesting, you know, today's work is entirely novel, what Gary you're doing is entirely new. You're talking about design, so the new. So what extra things to bring in in complex and unknown environments. That's really terrific. Thank you, Richard. Really appreciate it. Let me pass the mic to Judy. Well, I'd like to kind of continue on the question of trust because having dealt with corporate restructuring in a different environment than the community one but it is still a community. I was surprised at the high variability in the levels of leadership in their skill at actually listening to one another and thinking at a larger level than their own domain of influence. And so I was curious if you had suggestions when you have a group that's intrinsically differing in skill levels as well as previous biases or in self awareness or holistic thinking I'm not quite sure how to say what I mean but you're nodding so I think you know what I mean. Whether there are instructional processes or engagement processes that help move the group to a more cohesive rather than resistant point of view rather than forcing an external threat is there a constructive positive approach that you've seen it's effective. If I can jump in briefly, I think other people have more practical knowledge than I do but part of the thesis behind design from trust in the relationship economy and everything I've been working on for 25 years is that the work environment is typically hierarchical mail controlling hires and rewards and trains people to hit numbers and not trust other people I mean all the functions and filters in the corporate environment except for the exceptions. And I can point to many really great exceptions that are much more humane and trust the workforce but the typical one is an environment within which everything we're talking about here is like heresy and potentially threatening to your career track because if you're the type of a manager who made it to the top by beating people up below you and like beating everybody up the hierarchy. You're kind of screwed because you have a lot of skeletons in your closet and the moment you're looking for trust everybody's like yeah but you crap down me like five times in the last five meetings. Why are you even bringing this up so they feel vulnerable scared and they're going to probably double down on defensiveness and I think one of the interesting conversations here is how do you how do you open that conversation so that the person whose background whose history as Richard was saying is not promising in this moment for do I trust you. How can we get to a place where we can trust them again. There's a there's a novel about it called the Phoenix project believe it or not there's a novel about information technology departments in corporations. And it's really good because at one moment it's a little bit of a plot spoiler and the defensive type a executive says all right all right I kind of get what's happening. Let's have a separate meeting about why we're here and where we come from and he tells his story which is really like hard. And you're like oh okay that was a gesture of vulnerability that opened up that conversation so I think there's a whole thread we can follow there. Now whoever else would like to jump in to answer Judy's great question. Well I'll just jump in quickly just been response to Toby's and Judy's question. I we assume good intent, I think to your question Toby and then it's an invitation to to relationship from there. For us we kind of our umbrella is approaching from a spirit of service when we are going and going how can we we see alignment. How can we be supportive of you rather than what do you have to do to prove you're worthy of us. And when we come with that spirit accompanied by a very concrete demonstration of that unrestricted funding something shifts right from the beginning I think both in terms of power dynamics and in terms of willingness to go there. I totally agree with this point about embodying the values you're talking about really really crucial. And so just even in terms of our own kind of network and advocacy. That's why we have been finding in person encounters are are really key. I think the other than the Judy's question I mean one thing I think that we have found building trust and empathy is starting from a place of story. It's not one rather than going into the issue or the problem right away. That kind of drops people down a bit into this space you referred to, you know, being a little more vulnerable with each other. Listening in a different way. I'm going to just end with maybe another way this manifests I think within the philanthropic world a little bit there's so much talk about foundations need to take risks. Let's risk taking but and two things one it's kind of funny because everybody wants to take risks that succeed. And two, how we view risk really is around the integrity of the person. I mean for me the big right would somebody misspend the money or use it to something that's the risk, the risk that they might fail and what they're doing with a good faith effort. That's, we should be supporting that type of stuff so there's a really strange conversation sometime even around risk and risk taking within philanthropy that I think bringing the trust based frame is important. And just a final point about the unrestricted funding is it's often if people do provide what's called general operating support or unrestricted. It's kind of seen as a reward for good behavior. Okay, you proved yourself. Okay, here it is. I didn't get that. But actually, it's so fundamentally important to somebody starting out with an idea and something new. So, there's just, I think these things plug in a different way and as a as a funder I think coming into these relationships I think Gary raised a very good point earlier. Because we need to go in and go this is going to take maybe some time. And because of past history because of learned behaviors, and we need to be patient and listen and really listen again. And I just think that can't be stressed enough. Susan, I think you wanted to step into the conversation earlier. And also, we're in our last 10 minutes so I was going to step aside for a moment and see if the people who haven't jumped in much Tom, Ken, Jack would like to say anything and then for the rest of us if you want to think about, like a concluding like, what do you what question do you want to leave us with what, because I think there's definitely a call number two here Toby Europe for that. So let's, let's figure out how to focus that call on things that matter to us, Susan go ahead. You're muted. Still, there you go. So, yeah, I was, I just wanted to call out this question I keep hearing I assume good intent. And to point out that just as Jerry, and I started out with this idea that things are very complex and I think they are complex and not just complicated. I think that the that very, very many people will think that they are that they have good intent and they're good intent is not your good intent. And I just think there's, there's plenty of room to to sort of get a much more complex view. On that level, I would to, I think your name is Jill, is that right, Judy, Judy. Sorry, it just says Jay Benham here. Okay, it's all right. But I have worked both in the not for profit and the for profit and lots in the not for profit in the for profit world because I wanted to understand how it worked. Because I thought, I'm not sure we really understand how these organizations work. And I wanted to underscore what she alluded to at the beginning of her comments which was that it looks very much like the world that you are in. The techniques that you are talking about are very much the things that have worked when things work if you study. Why something worked when it worked. Instead of why didn't it work. When it didn't work. You get to a different set of questions, the, the, the, and I do think I was just going to say for our next conversation. So I would listening to, to this not for profit conversation and I wish it could be, maybe it is being recorded and that there is a conservation group that I have recently come to know who, who I would love to have them listen to this conversation you've just had, and for them to reflect on their own, on their own experiences, because I think, I think they, some of them instinctively know this too. It would be somebody to add to the conversation. That sounds wonderful. Thanks, Susan. Ken Tom. That sounds like Tom cat, or you know some compound name but although I don't think you guys are in a relationship but still would either of you like to jump in Tom. Thank you very much for the conversation I've got. This is such a broad conversation that you go in so many different directions. And as opposed to diving in I would love to have died in about five different places that it felt like we'd be pushing the conversation in different ways. So I really enjoyed where we're going. Having worked with the Coca Cola company on the obesity issue that one chart that we shared earlier was very interesting to me and I'll be definitely looking into that a little bit further. It reminded me that when you have disparate power relationships for all the different players in a complex environment, they all have different intentionality. Some of their intentionality is overt and some is covert. It leaves a very different outcome. The Chinese government just announced that their way of combating obesity is to emphasize exercise over calorie control. When I heard that I kind of knew what was behind that New York Times just came out with an article showing the nonprofit organizations that were funded by the food and beverage company that had the influence on the policy. And so this idea of designing for trust brings up the issue of sometimes you don't need to you don't have good reasons to trust each player in the conversation. And lastly, one of the books I got for Christmas that I'm going to be reading with June is this one by Yasha Monk, the age of personal responsibility. And what it's about is we have concepts that help guide our discussion or a way of thinking that goes through society over time. For decades, our conception of responsibility has shifted from one's responsibility to society and to others to personal responsibility for taking care of yourself. And if you don't, well tough luck, you don't even get any help from the state or services because you haven't shown that you're taking on enough of your own responsibility. To me, I think this is one of the big ideas that's getting in the way of our ability to trust each other and to trust the outcomes that we have as a group. I think also this is a really interesting bridge boundary crossover topic because the conservative critique is that people have lost their personal responsibility and we've shifted it all to the welfare state. And other other people are like, we see that people you know are acting irresponsibly or are not connecting in so I think this is a this is one of those issues where everybody's worried and there might be an interesting opening to have that conversation. So I love that you're reading that. Thank you. And it basically I think there's a key theme in what we've been talking about today that's very central to this idea to which is, when you see somebody who has a poor person begging on the street, he should be responsible for helping himself as one way. But that doesn't engage the social norms and the structural issues that contribute to that problem. So was he responsible for his efforts for responsible for his outcome. And where do we as others have contribute to those different ways of benefiting each other. Cool. Thank you. Judy, go ahead. I was just going to say to follow on what you just said, there's a really important dimension here that we could explore in another talk about the personal collective boundary that's at the heart of some of these trust issues. Because in the group dynamic what I've seen is that those are the root causes of the conflict is the uneven affiliation with the collective point of view. And then that impacts if you're not really engaged in the collective point of view your ability to trust or be trusted by the group. And where that then leads. And so it's, it's a complex dimension, but I appreciate very much you bringing that to the front of the discussion because I do think the sense of me first that has been a unique character of recent decades in social history, at least here and in other places, maybe even the current presidency. Sorry, maybe even the current presidency, but go ahead. Well, that's sort of the epitome of the me first atrocities, but I don't want to go there. For lots of obvious reasons, but I think that that one of the things I'm trying to understand and work on in every possible situation is trust and collective bonding. In terms of cohesion identifying the points where we have same value where we can connect to envision what the solution might be even if we don't agree on how we would get there. Anything that kind of increases the connectivity is important given that you have a very diverse audience that's coming from very different levels of awareness and compatibility and compromise capacity and other things. Thank you again. I'd like to thank everybody. This has been a really fascinating call. And I'm so delighted to hear about your work. It's, it's just, you know, it stirs me. It makes me feel good to know that you're out there doing this work as someone said, you know, we pretend to feel that we're alone. And trust is not the primary focus of my work, but as an OB consultant, it's often a big focus of the work. I threw some notes in there about a book called Trust by Fernando Flores. I think it's Robert Solomon and I can't remember the other author, but this idea of there's a compound here of capacity, capability and sincerity. And if any one of those are missing, you know, you end up with the lack of trust. And so many people are so overworked that they have the sincerity and the capability, but they lack the capacity. And so they keep breaking promises on that. Your roads trust over time. I'm a person who likes to get bodies in the room. So very often when I have a group, I will have them line up in a spectrum and do kind of a constellation. I'll put something to the floor and say, if you totally trust the team stand next to this thing and the less trust you have move further away. And then we pull and say, so why are you standing way over there? You know, and we'll ask what would need to shift or change for you to move closer into the center. And that can start a really interesting conversation. And the other thing I ask people is if you are the kind of person who normally trusts everybody implicitly, then what would it take for you to dial that back so you're a little bit more skeptical? And if the kind of person who you got to prove to me that you're worthwhile would take you just take one step towards I'll grant you a little bit. And I find that opens up a lot of room for folks, you know, it, it depolarizes in a way. So the other thing is, is say, you know, before we're going to talk about the things that we know is that was trust. But first, what are some things that have happened to you in the past that you really trust for you really quickly? You name those on the flip chart and people go, Well, now we know from our experience, these are the things you don't want to do. And then you say, okay, and when have you been guilty of this? And everybody goes, I did that once, you know. And, and so it's sort of humanizes and lets us know that it's not about feeling superiority and so normalize anything to do. So that's, that's my small contribution. I've really enjoyed being on this call. I feel privileged to be sitting with you all. Thank you so much. Thank you, Kim. Thank you all for for showing up. I wanted to throw a couple things in the conversation quickly at the end here. One is that the catalytic framework that Trey described earlier does this as does appreciative inquiry, which says trying to solve problems is itself a problem because it creates downward discourse. It's a little bit like your, your, your body goes where your head goes. And if you're looking downward at a problem, you're going to dive into the problem. So why not? So this is all about asking opening questions like what is the best thing we could do together? What would it take to get to this inspired future? There's a series of kinds of questions as Ken just showed that that reframe how people who have might have very different opinions can get together and do things. Two, we mentioned a couple times in the chat, the Kinevan framework is everybody familiar with Dave Snowden's Kinevan framework. So see why it's a Welsh word. So of course it looks nothing like it sounds. There's a really excellent video online. I can, I'll put a link to it. David Snowden explaining the Kinevan framework. It basically says that there's four kinds of problem spaces. There's simple, complicated, complex and chaotic. And simple and chaotic, you can sort of disregard simple, the stuff you can automate. It's algorithmic. You can say, oh, this is how to do simple. And we're automating the hell out of that. Chaos is you can ignore because it's so bad. It's temporary. You, the organization dies and goes away or it slips into one of the other spaces. The problem, and this is my takeaway from Kinevan, the biggest one is managers don't understand when they're in a complicated space where experts can help you. And when you're in a chaotic space where experts will lead you down the merry path to ruin. And I think what I love about Toby's approach and the approach we're all talking about here is that it's complexly informed, which means it takes as the basis that these thorny, wicked problems in horse riddles language. In fact, you need to explore your way into a solution. And in order to do that, you need to devolve trust to the people who can have the best judgment. And this goes to Lynn Ostrom's management of the Commons philosophies, polycentric governance factors in here. The idea that the closer in you get to what the issues are and give those people control over fixing it, the more likely you are to fix it. And then there's this other notion kind of on top of this, which is once you've solved this problem, it doesn't mean go to a new community and tell them what to do. It means we need to figure out what's the process to help the next community figure their way through the steps themselves because solutions have to come from local, the people have to understand it. They have to get to the place where they understand each other's intentions, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So sorry, that was longer than I expected, but I think I said it better than I expected to. A small thing too is every three years I get invited to be a teacher, a faculty at the Public Affairs Institute, which is run by the Public Affairs Consortium, that basically it's lobbyists and other sorts of people who go in and convince China that hey, diet doesn't really matter. It's all going to be about exercise. And it's really interesting because I feel like Daniel and the Lions done there and the people are really smart and our conversations are really good. And I'm trying to wake them up to these things while I completely realize that they're being paid to run the table for large organizations to build policies that constrict the kinds of things that we're talking about. So I think it's going to be another year, like next January, I hope to be back there and I want to inform what I do with them a little bit better. The last thing I'll say, and then back to you, Toby, for last words, or John or Richard or Dury, if you want to also kick in. Design From Trust has a little mailing list at Google Group, which I would love to have you all be on. We can talk there about these issues ongoing anytime at all. It's a conversational mailing list. And again, let's plan another call here, but let's go back to you, Toby, and then we'll take us out. So I feel like I've really enjoyed the conversation today. Thank you everyone for taking part in it. I've got three thoughts in my head right now. Firstly, in relation to the question of what develops trust, I was going to ask Gary to talk about the power of play as a mechanism to develop trust because he's got some quite interesting experiences about that. Maybe that's something we could talk about next time as play behaviour as a way to explore trust. I'd like to also reflect on the idea that trust is a radical act, and this hit home to me really strongly from attending the Whitman Institute retreat in September last year. The radical potential that you get from trusting people, I think, is really underestimated. But also, it is no coincidence that we have less trust between citizens, between those who are governed and those who govern the moment because it was a deliberate act of sabotage of trust over the last 30 years. And so putting trust back on the table and making trust building a central part of what we do is an act of resistance to that because the kinds of outcomes we're looking for, the kinds of politics that we want to be possible aren't possible in the absence of trust. And finally, kind of when this moves into the realm of kind of organisational behaviour and particularly kind of performance management, which is my area of study, I recently discovered an area of kind of performance management called stewardship theory, which is how you do performance management if you assume trust and good intention. And it's been this massively neglected area of kind of organisational study. I was digging out some articles from 1997 earlier that's got some, basically talking about the, exactly the stuff we're talking about today, but it's never really been implemented. So I can share some stuff about stewardship theory with people and that might be some areas for potential future exploration. That sounds phenomenal. Thank you. Let me stop sharing my screen. Jerry, John Richard, any last words? Just thanks for the invitation to participate in the conversation today, really appreciate it. And I would just underscore what Toby said around these are about radical acts and resistance. I would underscore those. Yeah. Thank you. And I completely agree. Part of my riff is that some parties in the arena have figured out how to weaponize trust and how to turn it against us, how to undermine it systematically in order to win elections. It's killing us and we have not figured out yet the countermeasures or antidotes or whatever. And I think that framing this as a radical act is a lovely way to do that. I appreciate it. Jerry, go ahead. You're muted, though. Yes. So one of the things I wanted to kind of leave with maybe for a future point is, so in our project, this is both very practical, but also it's symbolic of something very philosophical. So we've reached a point where we are almost unable to communicate with the rest of the new public management system. So we cannot explain to them in words they understand what good it looks like. When we speak to the people in our system, they say, I've never enjoyed coming to work more sickness rates objectively are lower DNA rates for patients are greatly reduced, you know, on all the objective measures we can see, although we don't actually use them as measures. It's better. And people will, if you speak to them, they'll tell you that we put in the corporate management where we haven't. We really struggled to explain to people why it's better. And that that presents for some of our services that straddle more than one authority or more than one county. They would they say to us, Plymouth is the best place to work. You know, it's really exciting. It's really radical. But I'm under enormous pressure from my boss because you don't do what we call the rank system, a red amber green rating system. You don't you don't do KPIs. So how can I prove I'm unable to prove so. So and similarly, locally when when, you know, this idea of accounting, which we kind of largely don't worry about really we talk about assurance rather than accounting. So it's a huge problem for us this this everything's lost in translation. But yes, it's been a great conversation and it's great to see you, John, you're looking really well. Richard. Yeah, just to thank everyone for the conversation it's been incredibly enriching to hear depth and breadth of people thinking and experience. I'm definitely coming away with questions, which would be great to continue the conversation, because I think, and it may be just a matter of context because they're coming at it from foundation. I think so much of what we've been talking about is about the human qualities of empathy relationship listening trust judgment that's based on knowledge, rather than something abstract or proxy. So there's an immediacy about it. So that's the question really. Can we talk about trust and anything that in ways that are anything other that necessarily imply smaller community context or small groups of people know how do we take this beyond small groups or small organizations or small networks. But just when I kind of have a hopeful thought as well, I think, because I feel that trust is infectious. And that if we can't, you know, we can control a whole system. We must never underestimate our ability nonetheless to have a remarkable effect on wider systems just by behaving in a particular way ourselves. Because that's the point of systems, you change one part of it and the whole thing swivels. So I think I just want to leave us with that sort of optimistic thought that I have and you can come back into that rubbish pile of sky or give me some confirmation because it does feel a bit lonely sometimes. Thank you. Thank you, Richard. I often describe myself as a short term cynic and a long term optimist by which I mean things in the short run are just going to be very messy because we have all these stresses, you know, showing up. And in the long run, I think what you're saying is right that this is catalytic change. It's not it's not necessarily slow, move the needle and you know how many people are left in poverty kind of change. This is a sea change of attitude that can and the world, you know, the world has seen sea changes happen or relatively rapid catalytic change happen now and then it's very infrequent. And all too often it's catalytic change toward the worst toward, you know, towards some some worse setting for most humans. You do not want to be a peasant in any country on earth pretty much in any time period because they are squeezing you for blood. And yet, if you want if you like the marsh Arabs way back around the days of Uruk and so forth we're living much better lives and the people in the cities there's a book against the grain by James Scott that I highly recommend where he debunks the origins of civilization. So so let's figure out how do you and I'm going to have a call on this at some point also like let's figure out how to bring forward the best of what we once used to know how to do with the best of what we are now able to do, which is really phenomenal. So I'm just totally thank you for for being my partner in crime for for convening this. The rest of you thank you for showing up. Let's do another call and sharpen sharpen the point on some of the things we talked about, but this has been really, really fantastic. I really appreciate it. Thank you all. Thank you everyone. Apologies for having to come in late. Glad you were there, Judy. Thank you. Thanks again. Thank you. Bye bye.