Ever since the publication of Steven M.R. Covey’s book The Speed of Trust in 2006, leaders across practically every sector of the economy—from corporations to nonprofits to higher education—have invoked the concept as the key to organizational success, real and symbolic profit, and institutional identity.
Forbes Magazine has touted “the speed of trust” as a learnable skill key to cost-saving at all scales. Nonprofits like the National Center for Family Philanthropy have promoted it as a workplace strategy essential to grant-making best practices. Public humanities centers at a host of colleges and universities have made it a centerpiece of their philosophies of community engagement.
Today, as we take a hard look at what trust means, and for whom, in our precarious democracy, models like Covey’s must undergo a serious course correction if we are to recommit to durable polities built on social equality and racial equity.
I’ll start with a self-correction.
When I came across the concept, I was a newcomer to the public humanities in higher education and I was eager for language and methodologies that promoted genuinely community-based collaborations and partnerships. I was seeking ethical relationship models in the context of a decade-long called Humanities Without Walls, which in its latter stages especially has been committed to “reciprocity and redistribution” (R&R) as pillars of its community-oriented practices.
That is, I wanted models of non-hierarchical, co-operative relations where co-created ideas were built on trust rather than use value or resource extraction for projects that only served the needs of, in this case, my university-based project. I was, and am, looking for ways of working that start with practices of reciprocity which help redistribute assets, fiscal and otherwise, in serve of community needs.
With its emphasis on relationship-building at the heart of trust-making, Covey’s call seemed like a workable method for honest and collaborative partnerships that are so rare at the boundary-line of campus and community.
But the “speed” in ‘speed of trust” should give us pause. Speed makes demands – for deliverables, for metrics, for “progress,” and for profit — that can be at odds with the realities of trust-building in real time. It’s certainly at odds with the kind of slow, carefully nurtured, and intentional cultivation required over years, even decades, if sustainable relations and the social transformations they promise are to take root.
Working “at the speed of trust” is not a silver bullet. It may even compound the trust problem.
That trust deficit is common in university-led community projects, which operate on the speed-time of academic semesters and their fiscal calendars. Even advocates of public humanities projects encounter well-earned suspicion which communities adjacent to academic-industrial complexes like research universities have developed over many years of living in what Davarian Baldwin calls The Shadow of the Ivory Tower.
Baldwin’s findings show that “community” projects adjacent to campus complexes are extractive at best and rapacious at worst – turning neighborhood relations into transactional processes and not uncommonly destroying local economies or distorting them out of all recognition in the process.
What’s needed, is, rather, “patience for the pace of trust.” This tenet is advanced by Ruth Łchav’aya K’isen Miller (Dena’ina Athabaskan and a member of the Curyung Tribe) co-founder and co-director of the Smokehouse Collective, a mutual aid network across Alaska aimed in part at regenerating the state’s commercial fishing industry by centering Indigenous lifeways – salmon and sovereignty – at the heart of all collaborations.
Speaking to a reporter in High Country News, which covers environmental issues and more in the US West, Miller emphasizes that “the collective aims to build its operations with patience for the pace of trust — the pace (at which) our community is able to manifest this in a responsible way.”
The difference between “pace” and “speed” is significant. Pace can be slow or fast, depending on the situation or issue at hand. And when “patience” is the lead, it sets an expectation for the rhythms of trust-building that allows for multiple speeds and anticipates recalibrations where needed.
Leading with patience does not necessarily mean that collaboration is happening. But it does clear a space for conversation about rates of speed and their relationship to trust – not as a commodity, but as an ongoing, equally distributed process.
The “pace of patience” is more than semantics, more than a tweak of Covey’s concept. Echoing Indigenous commitments to what Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer calls the “circular economy,” it’s a countermodel to dominant modes of capitalist profit underwriting the speed-trust model so assimilable to neoliberal modes of institutional trust-building.
What happens to the promise of moving at the speed of trust when we are in the middle of a crisis of trust of such global proportions that it threatens the very basis of democracy as we know it?
Trust-building practices have to be slowed down and baked in. And consistently, patiently attended to – not as a distraction or pathway to profit, but as part of any ethically grounded collaborative work.
There are no universal formulas in this work because every partner has their own rhythms and tempos. Anyone interested in developing trusting relationships has to disavow quick fixes and course correct toward reciprocity and redistribution all along the way, not just at the start.
Ideally such practices are designed and led by collectives like Smokehouse, whose community-centered values are powerful guides to co-created, sustainable trust-based relationships.
They might just be the answer to the crisis of trust whose consequences we will be paying for for many years to come.
