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. We wrote strategic plans, reviewed constitutions, clarified roles, developed policies and improved communication. I spent hours writing updates, answering questions and providing context because I genuinely believed that if people 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. If people felt disconnected, maybe they 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. More context. More transparency. 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. The problem was that people often understood perfectly well, but they simply 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. They can understand the reasons, the risks and the constraints and still walk away uneasy about the future.

I can see my own thinking all over this. If something wasn't working, my instinct was to find the missing information, improve the process or communicate more clearly. Somewhere in the back of my mind I seemed to believe that if I could just understand the problem well enough, I could solve it. If there was conflict, I looked for a process issue. If there was frustration, I looked for a communication issue. If people resisted change, I assumed they needed more information.

What I find interesting is that I now notice versions of this everywhere. Technology teams implement software and seem genuinely surprised when people continue doing things the old way. Organisations spend months developing strategies that make complete sense and then wonder why momentum doesn't appear. Change initiatives stall despite the logic behind them being perfectly sound.

The technical solution is often quite good. The harder part seems to be everything that sits around it. Trust. Confidence. Uncertainty. Habit. People's previous experiences. Whether they believe the people leading the change. Whether the future being described feels like one they want to be part of.

Over the past few years, particularly through more recent governance work, I've been asking a slightly different question. What problem are we actually trying to solve? A request for more consultation doesn't really seem to be about consultation. Resistance to technology isn't always about the technology. Disagreement isn't necessarily disagreement. It feels as though people are trying to answer entirely different questions. What will this mean for me? What might be lost? Can I trust the people making these decisions? Are we actually heading somewhere I want to go?

None of this has made me less interested in governance. If anything, the opposite is true. Good governance still matters enormously to me. Clear communication, transparency and process matters. I just seem to have become less convinced that these things automatically create alignment. They certainly help. They create structure, clarity and consistency, and organisations are usually healthier when they have them. But they don't appear to do the human work for us.

While a strategic plan can describe the future, a communication plan can explain the decision and a governance framework can clarify how decisions are made, people still need to decide whether they trust it. And perhaps that's the thing I've been turning over lately. We talk a lot about implementing systems, strategies, technologies and processes, yet many of the problems we wrestle with seem to sit somewhere else entirely.

You can implement software. You can implement governance. You can implement a process.

Trust doesn't seem to work that way.