Now that you've taken the Durable Trust Diagnostic...

Understanding your Trust State:

Your Trust State describes how others may be experiencing your organization through the perspective you bring to your work. It considers both those who are close enough to experience the organization directly and those who encounter it from a greater distance.

Your Trust State is created by the intersection of two dynamics: Conviction and Narrative.

The Conviction Axis: Compliance → Conviction

The Conviction Axis asks what people are able to see behind the work. At one end is Compliance: the work is experienced primarily through rules, requirements, programs, processes, or expectations imposed from elsewhere. At the other is Conviction: people can see the connection between what the organization does and the core beliefs and purposes that explain why it exists.

Distance matters. Those closest to an organization may see its convictions clearly, while those farther away may see only its activities, requirements, or outcomes.

The Narrative Axis: Displacement → Authority

The Narrative Axis asks who or what is defining the meaning of the work.

Narrative Displacement occurs when competing narratives define the organization in ways that are disconnected from the underlying reality. Those narratives can be highly critical or highly complimentary. What makes them displaced is not whether they are positive or negative, but their distance from what is actually true.

Narrative Authority exists when accurate accounts of the organization's work are consistently understood and have enough strength to shape how that work is perceived. Accuracy alone, however, is not enough. An organization can communicate accurately about things that matter very little to the people it serves. Narrative authority becomes especially powerful when what is true also connects with what people value.

Your Trust State reflects where those two axes come together.

Narrative Resonance: Conviction is visible and the narrative carries.

People can see what your organization stands for, and the prevailing narrative generally reflects both the reality and value of its work.

This is the strongest Trust State, but it is not permanent. Circumstances, competing narratives, leadership changes, institutional pressures, and distance can all disrupt resonance. The important question is not simply how you reached this state, but whether the conditions that produced it can be sustained.

Public Blindspot: Conviction may be strong, but the narrative isn't carrying it.

The work may be deeply grounded in purpose and experienced positively by those closest to it, while people farther away see something quite different — or very little at all.

The challenge here is Narrative Authority. This does not mean selling, spinning, or manufacturing a better story. It means becoming more capable of making the reality and value of the work visible enough to shape the prevailing narrative.

Narrative Drift: The narrative may travel, but the connection to core conviction is weaker.

People may hear about the organization and its work, but what travels does not consistently reveal why that work matters or connect it to the organization's deeper purpose.

The opportunity is to strengthen the connection between what the organization does, why it does it, and why that should matter to those it serves.

Fragmented Value: Neither conviction nor narrative is consistently coming through.

Different audiences may be receiving different signals about what the organization stands for, what it does, or why its work matters. Those closest to the organization may also experience that value differently.

The starting point is clarity: understanding the core convictions behind the work and becoming more deliberate about connecting what the organization does to those convictions.

One Important Caution

Your Trust State is not a grade and it is not a permanent label.

It is a diagnostic description of the pattern reflected in your responses at this point in time. Each state points to a different trust-building challenge — and therefore a different place to begin looking more closely.

Getting to know the Trust-Building Tools

Calling these tools is intentional. They represent how trust gets built, and the better you can learn to use each tool, the easier it will be for your trustworthy work to be trusted.

Your report introduced each tool and showed how it appeared in your results. Here are a few things to consider as you think about what those results mean.

Benefits

Knowing the benefits that matter most to your primary stakeholders may be the most important trust-building tool of all.

A primary stakeholder is someone without whom your organization loses its reason to exist. For a hospital, that is the patient. For a grocery store, the shopper. For a school, the student—and, by extension, the adults responsible for that student.

The challenge is that organizations often assume they know what these stakeholders value. The better approach is to ask.

Two questions are particularly useful:

1. What do you need from us in order to give us your trust willingly?
2. What hopes or dreams do you have as a result of engaging with us?

For mission-based organizations, the answers can reveal a great deal about the benefits people actually expect — not simply the ones the organization assumes they value.

Something to consider: Could you name the five or six benefits your primary stakeholders value most today? More importantly, would they name the same ones?

Shared Vocabulary

Benefits provide the starting point for a shared vocabulary because they give you and your stakeholders something meaningful in common. But shared vocabulary requires something else: learn their language rather than expecting them to learn yours.

Technical language inside an organization is useful and necessary. Acronyms, specialized terminology, and shorthand make complicated work easier to accomplish. The problem comes when that same language travels outside the organization.

Something perfectly clear to an expert can be almost meaningless to everyone else. And if people cannot understand what you are saying, it becomes much harder for them to understand — and ultimately trust — what you are doing.

Review your website, presentations, reports, emails, and conversations. Look especially for places where you begin with programs, processes, technical terms, or acronyms rather than something meaningful to the person listening.

Something to consider: Could someone unfamiliar with your profession explain what you do, why you do it, and the benefits that matter most after spending five minutes on your website?

Visible Decisions

A visible decision is one in which stakeholders can see their interests reflected in the choices you make. This is different from transparency. Transparency can mean opening the doors and allowing people to see what happened. Visibility means giving people a clear line of sight between something they value and a decision you are making.

A simple structure can help. Start with the benefit affected by the decision, then explain:

1. What will we keep doing?
2. What will we stop doing?
3. What must we discover or invent?

Each question does something important. What you will keep demonstrates that you recognize what is already working. What you will stop demonstrates a willingness to make room for something better. What you must discover or invent acknowledges that you do not yet have every answer.

And something interesting happens later. Even someone without technical expertise can come back and ask: Are you still doing what you said you would keep doing? Did you stop what you said you would stop? What have you discovered or invented?

That is accountability people can actually participate in.

Something to consider: Think about an important decision your organization recently made. Could stakeholder clearly explain how that decision serves something they value?

Bodies of Evidence

Once you make an important decision, you owe stakeholders some clarity about what they should expect to see if the decision works. That is the beginning of a body of evidence.

It does not begin with a spreadsheet or a collection of metrics. It begins by describing what the world should look like if your decision proves effective.

For example: “If this works, you should see fewer conflicts among students, greater parent confidence in how the school responds, and students reporting that they feel safer.”

Then ask an extraordinarily useful question: “If the evidence shows those things happening, would you accept that this decision is working?”

If the answer is yes, you have the beginnings of an agreed-upon body of evidence. Only then do you determine what evidence should be collected and how.

This matters for trust because the expectations were established before the results were known. You are not selecting evidence afterward, that even when valid can appear to have been done to make yourself look successful. Everyone knew in advance what success was supposed to look like, so when it happens it can be trusted.

Something to consider: For one of your organization's major initiatives, could you tell stakeholders — in ordinary language — what they should expect to observe if it is working?

Narrative Control

You have narrative control when truthful accounts of your organization's work can travel beyond the organization without losing their meaning along the way.

This isn't spin. It isn't marketing. And it doesn't mean eliminating criticism.

It means that when you communicate truthfully about your organization and its work, what people understand bears a strong resemblance to what is actually happening—even as the story travels farther away from you.

Narrative control is difficult because you never control the entire environment in which a narrative travels. Other narratives — accurate, inaccurate, positive, negative, or simply louder — will always exist.

That is why narrative control depends so heavily on the other tools:

1. Benefits give the narrative a starting point that matters to the audience.
2. Shared Vocabulary makes the narrative understandable and repeatable.
3. Visible Decisions allow people to see their interests in your choices.
4. Bodies of Evidence give people something credible to look for when deciding whether your claims are true.

When those tools are working together, your narrative becomes harder to displace—not because you said it louder, but because people can understand it, see themselves in it, test it, and repeat it.

Something to consider: If someone who trusts your organization were asked tomorrow why they trust it, would they be able to explain why to someone who doesn't?

Three tensions are always out there trying to get in the way of your trust-building efforts

The five tools describe things you can learn to do. The three tensions describe forces that are always acting upon your ability to do them.

Calling them tensions is intentional. They are not problems that can simply be solved and crossed off a list. Every organization experiences them, and they will increase and decrease over time. The goal is to recognize when they are interfering with trust and become better at managing their effects. Your report showed how each appeared in your results. Here are a few things to consider.

Complexity

Every organization is complex. Mission-based organizations often especially so.

There are specialized roles, technical requirements, competing priorities, regulations, internal processes, and decisions that make perfect sense to those inside the organization but can be extremely difficult for outsiders to understand.

Complexity becomes a trust problem when people have to understand how your organization works before they can understand why its work matters.

The solution is not to make the work less sophisticated. In fact, doing so could make the organization less effective. The challenge is to prevent the complexity necessary to do the work from becoming complexity that outsiders must navigate in order to trust the work.

This is where the trust-building tools become especially important. Benefits create a simple starting point. Shared vocabulary makes complicated work understandable. Visible decisions give people a line of sight into choices without requiring them to become experts. Bodies of evidence allow people to recognize success without having to understand every technical detail behind it.

Something to consider: How much would someone need to understand about how your organization works before they could explain why its work matters?

Narrative Competition

You are never the only one telling your organization's story. Employees, stakeholders, critics, supporters, news organizations, social media, community groups, political interests, and simple word of mouth can all create narratives about your organization. Some will be accurate. Some will contain pieces of the truth. Some may be completely false.

The trust challenge is that outsiders often have little ability to distinguish among them. When several competing explanations exist, what is demonstrably true can begin to look like just another opinion. And simply repeating your own narrative louder or more frequently does not necessarily solve the problem.

Your strongest defense against narrative competition is credibility that can travel. When your communication begins with benefits people value, uses language they understand, connects decisions to their interests, and is supported by bodies of evidence they recognize, people have reasons to give your narrative greater authority.

The goal isn't to eliminate competing narratives. You can't. The goal is to make the truthful narrative sufficiently understandable, credible, and repeatable that competing narratives have difficulty displacing it.
Something to consider: What narratives about your organization are currently circulating that you do not control — and what gives people reason to believe your account over the alternatives?

Institutional Pressures

Organizations rarely get to operate entirely according to their own priorities. Laws, regulations, funding requirements, governing bodies, professional standards, political pressures, market conditions, emergencies, and expectations from powerful stakeholders can all influence what an organization does.

Sometimes those pressures align beautifully with the organization's mission. Sometimes they do not.

The trust problem emerges when outside pressures cause the organization to behave in ways that appear disconnected from what its stakeholders value or from the convictions the organization claims to hold. That can be particularly difficult because the organization may have little choice in the matter.

But having limited control over a decision does not mean you have no control over how stakeholders experience it. You can distinguish between what you are choosing and what is being required of you. You can explain what you are trying to protect. You can make visible the tradeoffs involved. And you can continue grounding the conversation in the benefits your stakeholders value.

The goal is not to eliminate institutional pressure. That is rarely possible. It is to prevent those pressures from quietly redefining the organization and its relationship with the people it serves.

Something to consider: Where are outside requirements or pressures currently pulling your organization away from what your stakeholders value—and can those stakeholders see how you are managing that tension?

One Final Thought

The tools and tensions work together.

The tools — Benefits, Shared Vocabulary, Visible Decisions, Bodies of Evidence, and Narrative Control—represent capacities you can strengthen.

The tensions — Complexity, Narrative Competition, and Institutional Pressures — represent forces you must continually manage.

That distinction matters because a strong result does not mean the tensions have disappeared, and a weak result does not necessarily mean the organization is doing poor work. Trust is built through how effectively you use the tools while operating under the tensions that surround you.

Your results are therefore best treated not as a grade, but as a place to look: Which tools appear strongest? Which may need attention? And which tensions may be making trustworthy work harder for others to see and trust?

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