Secret 4

TRUST

Pursue Truth, Justice, and the Imagination Way

A relationship with no trust is like a cell phone with no service; all you can do is play games.

—UNKNOWN

Honor wine. It is a signature feature of Vincenzo’s Ristorante in Omaha, Nebraska. The wait staff at Vincenzo’s greet patrons at their table with a pitcher of their “honor wine”—an excellent Chianti. “Enjoy this if you like,” the waitress said to a group of us. “We charge by the glass. At the end of the meal just let me know how many glasses you had and I’ll add it to your bill.” When I asked the owner on our way out how many patrons drink the Chianti, he smiled and said, “Most … it’s one of our best features!”

Your customer’s imagination resides in a cocoon of emotional defense. Brain specialists inform us that every time a person is presented with a problem or a challenge, their imagination (right brain) provides a quiet answer or idea for a solution. But we hear only the loud response of our logical, rational (left brain) side that also speaks. Most business organizations do not hire musicians, poets, or artists who have learned to restrain their analytical side to provide a front row seat for their ingenious side. This means providers must convince a customer there is safety and well-being outside their imagination’s cocoon. Providers must become imagination pathfinders, promoting bravery to the customer’s timid imagination. This secret will explore ways to play that pathfinder role through how you demonstrate you are worthy of trust.

Trust is a core feature of all innovation cultures since it serves as an antidote to the judgmental close inspection that can retard ideas. Co-creation partnerships, as anxiety-free alliances, are all about paying attention to the trust gap, that emotional space between expectation and fulfillment and between hope and evidence. All customer relationships begin with a promise made or implied: “We’ll be landing on time,” “It will be ready by noon,” or “Your order will be right out.” Granted, great service recovery can transform an aggrieved customer into a mollified one. But the residue of betrayal will leave a disappointed customer perpetually on guard for the time when letdown reoccurs.

Trust means a readiness to take risks with your customer. It is a willingness to go forward with hope without looking back with apprehension. The foundation of that disposition requires opening up with sensitive information, feelings, or views with the expectation your partner will feel encouraged to do likewise. It is not a drive-by process but rather one that requires time and patience.

Goldcorp, a Canadian company that finds, extracts, and processes gold, had a mine called Red Lake in northwestern Ontario. It was not producing the amount of gold expected, plus the gold market was depressed. CEO Rob McEwen was attending a seminar on Linux, an open-source operating system. “Why not create open-source mining?” He created the Goldcorp Challenge—anyone who could tell Goldcorp where to mine would get prizes worth up to $100,000. But here is the trust part. He did something no one had ever done. He turned over all their super-secret data on the Red Lake mine online. Over fourteen hundred geologists from fifty countries participated in the challenge. The winner was a company from West Perth, Australia. When Goldcorp drilled the sites the winner had predicted from their modeling, Goldcorp hit on all four. Today Goldcorp is the world’s fourth-largest producer of gold.¹

Trust is honor in action, the soul of a partnership covenant. A covenant is more vow than pact. It is undergirded by a moral pledge, not just a contractual one. We rely on it to govern fair and proper practice. Customer interactions aren’t generally regulated by formal contracts that bind provider and customer to virtuous behaviors—customers simply assume they will be treated in a respectful, ethical, and civil manner.

Trust has three components in the context of co-creation partnerships (figure 6). It first begins with the whole truth. “If you want to be trusted, be honest,” goes the old saying. “If you want to be honest, be true. If you want to be true, be yourself.” Authentic candor and squeaky-clean dealings telegraph a purity that communicates to your customer’s imagination that it is safe to come out. It emboldens your customer’s imagination to tell the customer’s logic to be quiet and wait its turn.

Second, trust relies on work agreements that reflect mutual expectations. These are the establishment and communication of what each promises the other. Keeping promises requires knowing the guarantees made. Smart promise keepers also recognize the players in the partnership are imperfect people. Misunderstandings, mistakes, and miscalculations can plague any relationship and put it at risk of being derailed. Wisdom comes in making “caution lights for covenants” a part of the partnership expectations. Partners feel secure if there is already a partnership preventive-maintenance plan in place.

Customers don’t expect providers to be perfect; they do expect them to care. And in the case of co-creation partnerships, they expect them to care deeply about the welfare of their partner as well as the wellness of their relationship. Renovating a broken relationship after a partnership glitch can return the union to productivity, often with a bond stronger than before.

All my life I thought leaves departed trees in the fall because they got too old to hang onto the branch and gravity bested their grasp. It does not work that way. Trees literally release their leaves from the limb. It made me think about a customer releasing their imagination to be used in the resolution of a problem or challenge. Here is how a leaf becomes the prey of gravity. As days get colder and shorter, trees create a hormone that sends out a chemical message and triggers the creation of cells that appear at the spot where the leaf stem meets the branch. These abscission (root word for scissors) cells make a microscopic-sized cut that gradually severs the leaf from the branch. Trust is like a leaf’s chemical message to your customer’s imagination. It changes the imagination’s holding onto the safety of the bedroom of familiarity so the imagination willingly falls onto the playground of innovation.