You can't implement trust

I thought better communication would bring people along. It took me much longer to understand that understanding and agreement are not the same thing.

For years, particularly during my time on volunteer boards, I believed that if I could just explain something properly, people would come with me. This seemed entirely reasonable. If people understood the problem, surely they would support the solution. If they understood the financial reality, the constraints, the risks and the options that had been considered, surely they would reach the same conclusion.

Much of my time was spent trying to create that understanding, and we were quite deliberate about making it easier for people to engage with us. We wrote strategic plans, reviewed constitutions, clarified roles and developed policies, but we also started a club newsletter, ran regular webinars and created opportunities for people to simply come and talk. For a long time I ran a weekly GoToMeeting where I would open the room and sit there, whether anyone joined or not, just so there was a regular place people knew they could find us.

I spent hours writing updates, answering questions and providing context because I genuinely believed that if people had access to the conversation and understood not only what had been decided, but why, they would feel more comfortable with the outcome.

When people seemed unhappy, I assumed they didn't have enough information. If there was resistance, perhaps we hadn't communicated clearly enough, and if people felt disconnected, maybe we needed more engagement. At the time it all felt perfectly logical.

Around that same period I became interested in stakeholder engagement and change management. ADKAR particularly appealed to me because it made sense to the way my brain works. Awareness, desire, knowledge, ability and reinforcement felt like a practical way of understanding how people move through change, although I think I paid far more attention to the first step than the second.

Awareness made complete sense to me. No awareness equals no movement. If people didn't understand where the organisation was heading, how could they possibly support it?

So I focused on communication, with more context, more transparency and better explanations. I would spend hours trying to craft the right message because it seemed obvious that if people understood the board's thinking, they would arrive at the same conclusion.

Except quite often they understood perfectly well and still didn't agree.

That took me much longer to understand than I care to admit. People can understand why a decision has been made and still wish you had made a different one. They can understand the financial reality and still feel disappointed, or understand the reasons, the risks and the constraints and still walk away uneasy about the future. Understanding something doesn't oblige you to agree with it.

I can see my own thinking all over this now. If something wasn't working, my instinct was to find the missing information, improve the process or communicate more clearly. There was always another lever to pull, another way to explain it, another bit of structure that might make the whole thing work.

It has been interesting to realise how often I still see versions of that thinking, just in completely different settings.

Password managers are a good example. From an IT perspective they make perfect sense: the technology exists, the security benefits are well understood and the organisation can roll it out to everyone. Yet people still reuse passwords, find workarounds or avoid using the system altogether. We can call that a technology problem, but the technology itself may be working perfectly well.

AI is making the same thing much more visible. Organisations are still working out policies, governance, approved tools and adoption plans while their employees are already using it, often through personal accounts and in ways nobody officially designed. The organisational response tends to be about systems and controls because those are things we know how to implement, while the behaviour we're trying to influence is already happening around them.

I keep noticing versions of this everywhere now. A strategy can make complete sense and fail to create momentum. A change can be explained thoroughly and still make people uncomfortable. A consultation process can answer every question that was asked and somehow leave people feeling that they weren't heard.

It makes me wonder whether we're sometimes answering the question that is easiest to solve rather than the one people are actually asking.

That thought has changed some of my more recent governance work. I still care about the process, probably more than ever, but I've become much more interested in what sits underneath the thing presenting itself. When someone asks for more consultation, I find myself wondering what they were hoping the consultation would give them. When people keep returning to a decision that has already been explained, I'm less inclined to assume the explanation failed. They may understand it perfectly well.

Sometimes it feels as though people are answering entirely different questions. The organisation might be asking whether a decision is financially responsible, strategically sound or properly governed, while the person affected by it is wondering what it means for them, what might be lost, whether they trust the people making the decision or whether the future being described feels like somewhere they want to go.

Neither conversation is necessarily wrong, but a beautifully governed answer to one doesn't resolve the other.

Perhaps this is why I haven't become less interested in governance as I've become more conscious of its limits. Good governance still matters enormously to me, as do clear communication, transparency and good process. They create structure, clarity and consistency, and organisations are usually healthier when they have them. What I've become much less certain about is our tendency to assume that getting those things right means people will follow.

A strategic plan can describe the future, a communication plan can explain a decision and a governance framework can make it clear how that decision was reached. A password manager can even generate the perfect password.

None of them can decide how a person will respond.

I think that's the connection I've been circling around. We are very good at implementing things we can design, document, configure and measure, while the things that ultimately determine whether any of it works are often much messier. Habit, confidence, history, fear, belonging and trust don't arrive because the implementation plan says they should.

You can implement the system. You can't implement trust.