Trust Building & Integrity

Ask any alliance manager about the value of trust in a relationship, and they will wax eloquently about its impact on success. Without trust, strategic relationships fail, period. Trust is the foundation of all cooperative enterprise.

Trust is the hallmark of the personal relationships between the people who constitute the team. Without this trust, no legal agreement, no strategy, no structure, and no process can achieve its objectives. These personal trusting relationships distinguish great team leaders from their transactional cousins who bring the Fool’s Golden Rule into the relationship:

• “He who has the Gold: Rules.

The best strategic relationships tend to use three metallic rules:

• Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."
• Silver Rule: "At least do for yourself what you would do for others."
• Iron Rule: "Don’t do for others what they can do for themselves.

Trust is the glue that binds personal relationships and the grease that prevents frictional differences from becoming fractious.

Trust and Integrity are the threads of the complex relational fabric. Integrity is more than just being honest or trustworthy. Integrity means being true to oneself, to one’s deepest values; and the benefits are ultimately both a divine blessing and a liberating freedom.

“Integrity resides in the ability to constitute yourself as your word. As such it is a home, an anchor, a self-generated and continuing commitment to honor your word despite contrary thoughts and feelings if need be. It is a consistency of being, speaking and acting that shapes who you are to yourself and to others.”

     Anonymous

Integrity becomes a divine gift by enabling us to touch the deepest yearnings of others around us, thus creating a new set of possibilities filled with hope and inspiration. Integrity is thus expansive, allowing us to become more than ourselves, to create with others, to empower others.

For Gerry Dehkes, when he was alliance champion at Telcordia,

“Integrity includes setting expectations and consistently meeting them. Doing both is important. Making sure that your counterparts will know (and be able to trust) that you will act in a certain way in a given situation. Then meet or beat that expectation consistently. This extends beyond the individual to the rest of the people in the alliance partners organizations. Or better, in an old Minnesota expression; ‘Underpromise. Over Deliver.’ View problems or barriers, especially early on, as opportunities to show your trustworthiness, meeting the expectations you've set with your partners. These have strong impact beyond the decision of the moment. They engender trust that later on you will indeed act that way, thus inviting reciprocal actions.”

The Importance of Trust in Human Evolution

Insightful Questioning is the “Lead Intellectual Arrow” and Trust is the “Lead Cultural Arrow” (in a quiver of multiple, interactive causative processes) of human evolution that Direct the Course of History, the Fate of Nations, and the Destinies of People.

It is the Key Determinative Factor in the Creation of Synergy in human social systems.

Synergy is the Deepest Yearning of the Human Soul -- our Highest Quest, the true Holy Grail.

Trust has played a massive role in the evolution of society as a whole. When communities trust, people flourish, as exemplified by the Greeks and their Golden Age of Innovation. And when trust is replaced with actions marked by high levels of aggression, betrayal, and manipulation, societies rapidly decline, as evidenced by the Dark Ages, World Wars, and many African and Middle Eastern nations today.

Trust takes Fear out of the Social Equation, interceding to prevent wars and destruction. Trust impacts the Economic Equation by limiting the destructive force of fear -- and its associated behaviors, such as excessive protection, legal costs, and transaction costs -- from sucking away the real creative force of the human spirit and its derivative innovations, which is the principle source of economic wealth generation. Thus trust enables the Economics of Expandables to flourish and Synergy to manifest itself as Economic Wealth.

For centuries, sociologists have thrashed the dilemma of why societies don’t evolve on an ever-upward path, especially given the seemingly limitless learning capacity of humans. Trust is the determinative factor in directing the ascendance, descendance, or stagnation of any social group, whether it be a family, a business, a community, or a nation. One’s ability to trust prudently may be the most important social skill in humankind’s repertoire.

Synergy is not just the perchance outcome of highly beneficial combinations of differing elements, it's a causative force driving the evolution of complex human and organizational systems. Cooperation to Create More is a basic genetic aspiration of higher order living organisms, just as reproduction is in lower order biological organisms.

And in many circumstances synergy is self-regenerative in that synergistic systems create their own energy to drive the next stage of evolution. Socio-biologic synergy is does not wind down (as in Newton's Laws of Entropy), but becomes self-sustaining, and self-regenerating so long as psychic energy is not threatened by fear and the potential of destruction.

Having begun to crack the basics of the Synergy Code, we are now, on the cusp of a massive evolutionary shift in the possibilities of the human race, from Homo Sapiens to Homo Synergens.