Design from Trust Is Widespread Already
It's just that nobody calls it that.
Have you surfed the Internet? Used a ride-sharing service like Uber or Lyft? Attended an Unconference? Held any Local Currency? Made a Microloan through Kiva? Been to a store or restaurant where you could Pay What You Want? Used the Wikipedia? Served time in Norway? Honored an Honor Code? Attended Quaker Meeting? Cultivated an Edible Landscape? Paid something forward? Received an Unconditional Cash Transfer? Experienced Workplace Democracy? Used Open Source code? Engaged in Restorative Justice? Unschooled your kids? Walked or driven through a Traffic Calmed intersection?
If your answer to any of those is yes, you've already experienced Design from Trust.
Design from Trust didn't start as an abstract model built up from first principles about trust and social dynamics. It showed up when I identified the common "red threads" that wove through many of these examples of existing systems that are unusual, yet successful in the real world.
The early examples often showed up in stories about their inventors. For example, the story of Muhammad Yunus giving a $27 loan to a circle of 42 Bangladeshi women who had zero collateral taught me about microfinance. Pam Warhurst's TEDx talk explained how inspired citizens could turn ordinary towns into edible landscapes, transforming their town, creating food, and building community. John Taylor Gatto, who I got to meet in person when I lived in Manhattan, convinced me that our compulsory education system stamps out curiosity and our sense of agency, and ought to be replaced with something more like self-directed education. And I just posted about Jimmy Wales's crazily successful quest to create an open encyclopedia.
You can browse the bigger collection of examples of Design from Trust I curate in my Brain, here.
I'll be describing those connective threads more shortly, in these posts. Subscribe or follow if you'd like to see how it goes.
Naming the common patterns
Design from Trust describes the thread, tracing a reliable process for transformative change that builds back community, trust and purpose. It isn't a theory waiting to be tested. It's not a think-tank proposal or an academic framework hoping for real-world validation. It's already working in the real world, at scale, in high-stakes situations. You've probably experienced it yourself — you just didn't know what to call it.
If you edited Wikipedia, you participated in a system that assumes contribution over vandalism. When you used open source code (like the Internet and the Web!), you relied on a system designed around collaboration without contracts. When you took that Lyft to the airport to stay at an Airbnb in Paris, you used commercial systems that are built on trust. These aren't small pilot programs. They're functioning systems that millions of people use successfully.
The breakthrough isn't inventing Design from Trust. People have been implementing it for decades, some for centuries. The breakthrough is recognition: seeing that these seemingly unrelated successes share a common architecture, a set of principles that can be articulated and applied systematically. I'll be describing those principles and methods here, too.
Once you see the pattern, you can't unsee it. Suddenly you recognize it everywhere: in the honor code that actually works, in the workplace without managers, in the intersection without stoplights that's somehow safer than the one with them. You start to understand why these systems succeed where traditional command-and-control approaches fail.
And once you see it clearly, you can build it deliberately. You can take the principles that make Wikipedia work and apply them to neighborhood governance. You can take what makes ride sharing effective and apply it to other assets. You can take what makes unconferences energizing and apply it to corporate meetings. You can mix and remix.
The architecture is proven. The question isn't whether it works. We know it works. The question is: what happens when we use it on purpose?
When trust is at a deep ebb, organizations that offer real trust will stand out. People are hungry for trustworthy systems and organizations.
#trust #designfromtrust
This article is cross-posted on Substack here, Medium here and LinkedIn here. It's also here in my Brain.