There is no algorithm for trust- so stop behaving like there is!

More tools, more data, now AI. The change still does not hold.

Hey, how are you?

We keep trying to solve a trust problem by either telling people to trust more or by buying a better tool, and the tools keep improving while the results stay roughly where they were.

Earlier this week I delivered a virtual webinar for the LCS community. A screen full of change practitioners. Good ones. Really good ones!

People who know the methods inside out and have the certificates to prove it.

A question I posed early was potentially a challenging one for a group like that.

We have more tools than we have ever had. More data. More software. Now AI as well.

So why is making change stick still about as hard as ever?

The honest answer is that none of those things go anywhere near the part that actually decides it.

A method tells you what good looks like. It does not tell you whether the operator believes you. It does not tell you whether the supervisor who has sat through four of these already is going to give you the real version or the polite one.

Here is the something worth sitting with for a little bit. When improvement stalls, we almost always add something. A better tool. A clearer dashboard. A tighter stage gate. One more standard. It feels like progress, because it is visible and it can be put in a plan.

It is also one of the most expensive wrong turns there is, because the thing that stalled was never a gap in the method.

Three things I would argue, and did.

Saying it is not the same as it landing. The same sentence, delivered to two people on the same shift, gets received two completely different ways. We treat communication as a transmission problem when it is a reception problem.

You cannot instruct collaboration. You can require people to attend a meeting. You cannot require what they are willing to say once they are in it.

And people protect what they help to build. They do not protect what they are told to implement. That is not a nice idea for a slide. It is the reason some changes are still running two years later and others quietly stopped the week after the folder was handed over.

AI has not changed any of this. It has made the first half of the job much faster and left the second half exactly where it was. Which is a decent thing to be optimistic about, as long as you are honest about which half you have automated.

One of the people on the call wrote this afterwards, and it is better than anything I said on the day.

A change practitioner in the LCS community

​

The question for your commute: on the change you are running right now, who has told you something you did not want to hear in the last month?

If nobody has, it is not because there was nothing to tell you.

The step: pick one person close enough to the work to know where it is going wrong, and ask them for the unpolished version. Then do the hard part, which is not defending anything while they say it.

A word on how this works, since a few of you have asked.

There are two doors into Get Knowledge. Improvement, which is this week’s subject, and leadership. They are two views of the same organisation, and most of what I get called about lives somewhere between them.

There is a talk for each. There Is No Algorithm for Trust is the improvement one, and it is the session this week came from. Culture is the Real BOSS is the leadership one, about the everyday behaviours that quietly set the standard in a team.

Both do the same job. They get a room talking honestly about something it has been working around.

If you are looking for something different for your team, hit reply and tell me which door you are standing at and what you are dealing with. I will tell you straight whether I can help.

That is for this week. If it landed a bit close, that is usually the sign.

Have Fun

Lee

Co-founder of Get Knowledge.

Author of The People Puzzle.