Jerry's Parking Lot
Texts to use.
Design from Trust addresses many topical questions. For example, it can help us:
- Build authentic, durable trust with our clients and customers (and employees and suppliers).
- Break the grip of addictive social media and surveillance capitalism.
- Rebuild trust in institutions (by changing them, not by marketing them better).
- Retake control over the design of our living spaces and institutions.
- Bridge the political divides that separate us.
- Repair our failing systems, from education and governance to health care, urban design and more.
- Help people connect to meaning and purpose.
- Help young folk find their way into promising adulthood.
- Make the best use of Generative AI to create positive futures.
Don't trusting societies always lose to violent ones?
Designing from trust usually isn't a patch to existing systems. It requires thoughtful (re)design that follows a set of principles.
Wikipedia illustrates this need for thoughtful redesign nicely. It wasn't originally a wiki at all. It started life as the Nupedia project, modeled on traditional publishing. When that effort wasn't working, the project team had a caterpillar-to-butterfly moment that was neither obvious nor easy, but which led to the team's finding a way to the organic, explosive growth that gave us the modern Wikipedia.
In this case, the inventors of the Wiki did the thoughtful Design from Trust; Wikipedians adopted and inherited it, then enhanced it as they solved problems that smaller wiki sites hadn't yet hit, as well as features peculiar to a global encyclopedia.
In Design from Trust, just seeing the contradictions isn't enough. You have to shift your thinking, because from today's default frame of mind, many of the solutions DfT proposes seem counterintuitive or just a bit crazy, as I described earlier. A real shift in your perspective allows you then to shape the new dynamics you want to create, then set it all in motion.
Underpinning this change model are the Principles of Design from Trust, which start with Assume Good Faith (or Intent). More on these soon, too.
Finally, because Design from Trust is the common thread connecting very different movements and industries, your ability to see it improves the more stories you hear of DfT examples. I've started telling these stories here and here and would love to spark others' extending this catalog.
Storytelling is key to our collective growth.
About mirrors
About those "mirrors...."
Because it involves trust, you can't just bolt Design from Trust onto existing systems and expect it to work. It needs a feedback loop from experienced guides I think of as "mirrors," because one of their more important tasks is to reflect things back that you may not want to see. These mirrors might be experienced DfT facilitators, or perhaps just other people who are ahead of you on the Design from Trust path, and can point out those hard-to-see contradictions.
Mirrors are necessary because we're often blind to the ways in which we're breaking trust, in large part because we've normalized those practices. For example, we think of advertising as a very normal part of many business models, so much so that ads fuel several of the largest, most influential companies on the planet. Alas, advertising bakes in multiple breaches of trust: companies dumpster-dive our data, analyze it to discover what causes us to buy, then fill our world with offers and enticements, often (usually?) for things we don't need. And we've normalized it.
In contrast, Design Thinking, which predates Design from Trust, doesn't need mirrors because it relies on empathic observation and rapid prototyping. You can train groups in practically any setting to use Design Thinking, and they will produce interesting results... but likely not transformative results, and sometimes results that reinforce existing dysfunctions.
Design from Trust brings Design Thinking the moral compass that it lacks.
Sonnet 4.5:
Option 1: The Hidden Pattern
"These systems already work. They're solving real problems right now, from Bangladesh to Norway to your neighborhood intersection. But because no one has named the pattern, we keep reinventing the wheel—or worse, dismissing these successes as isolated quirks. What if they're not quirks? What if there's a reliable design principle here that could be applied anywhere trust has broken down?"
Option 2: The Unlocked Tool
"The tool already exists. It's been tested in prisons, banks, classrooms, and city streets. But it's scattered across a hundred different domains, each thinking they invented something unique. Connect the dots, and suddenly you're not looking at interesting experiments—you're looking at a blueprint for rebuilding trust in any system that's lost it."
Option 3: Direct and Bold
"Design from Trust isn't a theory waiting to be tested. It's already working in the real world—you've probably experienced it yourself. The breakthrough isn't inventing it. The breakthrough is recognizing that these seemingly unrelated successes share a common architecture. Once you see it, you can build it anywhere."
Option 4: The Stakes Version
"We're surrounded by working examples of systems that create trust instead of merely policing behavior. But because they exist in silos—education here, criminal justice there, finance over there—we miss that they're variations on the same theme. Meanwhile, our default institutions hemorrhage trust. We don't need to invent a solution. We need to recognize the one that's been hiding in plain sight."
Option 5: The Invitation
"What you've just read about isn't aspirational. It's actual. These systems exist and thrive. The pattern was always there; it just needed someone to trace it. And once traced, it becomes replicable. That's what makes this different from another think-piece about fixing society: the answer is already deployed. We just need to see it clearly enough to use it deliberately."
Here are expanded versions of all five:
Option 1: The Hidden Pattern (Expanded)
"These systems already work. They're solving real problems right now, from microfinance in Bangladesh to prison reform in Norway to traffic intersections in your own neighborhood. Millions of people interact with them daily. They have track records, data, and proven outcomes.
But because no one has named the pattern that connects them, we treat each as an isolated case study. The education reformers don't talk to the criminal justice innovators. The urban planners don't compare notes with the financial inclusion advocates. Each domain thinks it discovered something unique to its field.
Meanwhile, we keep reinventing the wheel. Or worse—we dismiss these successes as lucky outliers, interesting experiments that worked in one specific context but couldn't possibly scale or transfer. "Sure, that works in Scandinavia." "Of course Wikipedia succeeded—the internet is different." "Those people were just more motivated."
What if they're not quirks or exceptions? What if there's a reliable design principle here that transcends context? What if the reason a Norwegian prison, an unconference, and a pay-what-you-want restaurant all succeed isn't because of their unique circumstances, but because they're all implementing the same underlying architecture—one that could be applied anywhere trust has broken down?
The pattern exists. It's been field-tested across wildly different domains. We just haven't learned to see it yet."
Option 2: The Unlocked Tool (Expanded)
"The tool already exists. It's not theoretical. It's not speculative. It's been tested in maximum security prisons and farmers markets, in banking systems and elementary schools, in traffic engineering and conflict resolution.
It's working right now in dozens of contexts, solving problems that our traditional enforcement-based systems struggle with. Open source software powers the internet without contracts or bosses. Restorative justice reduces recidivism better than punishment. Traffic calming creates safer streets than traffic cops. The data is in.
But here's what's been missing: each domain thinks they invented something unique. The prison reformers believe they're doing "criminal justice innovation." The education pioneers think they're doing "progressive pedagogy." The urban designers believe they're doing "participatory planning." They're all writing their own manuals, creating their own vocabularies, telling their own origin stories.
They don't realize they're all using the same tool.
It's as if a hundred different craftspeople independently discovered the lever, but because one calls it a "force multiplier," another calls it a "mechanical advantage device," and a third calls it a "fulcrum-based system," nobody realizes they're describing the same physics.
Connect the dots, and suddenly you're not looking at interesting experiments scattered across unrelated fields. You're looking at a blueprint—a transferable design principle for rebuilding trust in any system that's lost it. You're looking at something that can be taught, replicated, and applied deliberately.
The tool is already built. We just need to recognize it as a tool."
Option 3: Direct and Bold (Expanded and used in Widespread)
"Design from Trust 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.
When you edited Wikipedia, you participated in a system that assumes contribution over vandalism. When you used open source code, you relied on a system designed around collaboration without contracts. When you paid what you wanted at that restaurant, you entered into a system built on reciprocity rather than enforcement. 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.
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 stop signs 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 Norwegian prisons effective and apply it to schools. You can take what makes unconferences energizing and apply it to corporate meetings.
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?"
Option 4: The Stakes Version (Expanded)
"We're drowning in a crisis of trust, and we're surrounded by the solution.
Look around: institutions are failing. People don't trust their governments, their media, their schools, their healthcare systems, their neighbors. We pour resources into enforcement—more rules, more monitoring, more punishment—and trust keeps declining. We're trapped in a vicious cycle where distrust breeds control systems that breed more distrust.
Meanwhile, right under our noses, there are systems that create trust instead of merely policing behavior. They're not utopian fantasies. They exist, they work, and many of them work better than the conventional alternatives they replace.
But because they exist in silos—education here, criminal justice there, urban planning over there, finance somewhere else—we miss that they're all variations on the same theme. The unschooling advocate doesn't realize they're using the same core principles as the restorative justice practitioner. The traffic engineer who removes signs doesn't know they're implementing the same philosophy as the workplace democracy organizer.
So we keep treating these successes as isolated curiosities. "Interesting what they did in that one town." "Nice idea, but it wouldn't work here." We study them as exceptions rather than examples. We write case studies instead of extracting principles.
This is the tragedy: we don't have a knowledge problem, we have a recognition problem. The solution isn't locked away in some researcher's lab waiting to be discovered. It's deployed, operational, and proven. It's been stress-tested in exactly the kinds of high-stakes, complex situations where trust matters most.
We don't need to invent a way to rebuild trust in broken systems. We need to recognize the pattern in the systems that never broke—or that broke and then fixed themselves in a fundamentally different way.
The answer is already here. We're just not looking at it right."
Option 5: The Invitation (Expanded)
"What you've just read about isn't aspirational. It's not a vision of how things could work in some ideal future. It's actual. These systems exist, right now, in the messy real world with real people and real constraints. They're not perfect, but they're working.
Open source software didn't wait for humanity to evolve before it succeeded. Norwegian prisons reduced recidivism with actual criminals, not with hand-picked model citizens. Microfinance worked with people who'd been deemed too poor to be trustworthy. Wikipedia got built by whoever showed up, including trolls and vandals, and became the most reliable general reference work in human history.
The pattern was always there. It was hiding in plain sight, scattered across different domains, implemented by people who often didn't realize they were part of something larger. It just needed someone to trace it—to see that the thread connecting unconferences to honor codes to traffic calming wasn't coincidence but design.
And once traced, once articulated, once made visible—it becomes replicable.
That's what makes this different from another think-piece about fixing society's problems. This isn't someone's clever theory about what might work if we all just tried harder. This is pattern recognition. This is pointing at things that already work and saying: "Look. See that? And that over there? And that? They're the same thing. And if they're the same thing, we can do it again. On purpose. Anywhere."
You can learn the principles that make Wikipedia work. You can understand why Norwegian prisons succeed. You can grasp what makes a pay-what-you-want restaurant viable. And once you understand them not as isolated miracles but as implementations of a coherent design philosophy, you can apply that philosophy yourself.
The answer is already deployed. It's been field-tested across dozens of contexts. It scales. It works with real humans, not idealized ones. We just need to see it clearly enough to use it deliberately.
That's the invitation: to see what's been working all along, and to build more of it."