How Vendors and Tools Get Trust Wrong

This is part 4 of The Math of Trust: A Leader’s Guide. Read the headlines for the main ideas. If you want details or justification, dig into the paragraphs that follow the headline.

In the first three parts of this series, we introduced the math of trust. We looked at why trust matters. Then, we looked at simple ways leaders break trust. In this section, we'll look at some of the go-to ways people try (and fail) to avoid trust breaks. There are abundant tools and technologies to help things "get done." Most vendors of these tools and technologies get trust wrong. In this section of The Math of Trust: A Leader's Guide, I'll break down how and why vendors get it wrong.

Outdated management concepts get in the way of the trust equation. Vendors tend to build around these concepts.

Vendors design and build on outdated management philosophies with foundations in the 1920s. There are fixes to help those 1920s foundations last longer. In the end, these fixes create more work, more inconsistency, and more distrust. It happens even with near-unlimited resources. (See "Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World") for more on this.

Here are a few of the outdated ideas that break trust.

"Command and control" is a management style that breaks trust.

Have you ever met a "tough-nosed" leader with high expectations and zero empathy? These leaders often favor command and control, which has become the default leadership style for many company leaders.

In this style, the person at the top makes the decisions and tells people what to do. Orders then cascade down a management hierarchy. The theory assumes that individuals do their jobs and that the results follow.

In practice, this rarely works.

Leaders often channel their inner "hard-nosed leader" when things don't go as planned. They use military and sports metaphors to justify command and control. It is telling that the military and professional sports don't use command and control. They found it too slow and too easy to break, and it broke trust.

Once upon a time, functional silos helped leaders stabilize and improve their systems. Today, functional silos block adaptation and growth. They break trust without serving their original purpose.

Most companies organize using a 1920s system from the manufacturing industry. They group reporting structures by technical function. We call these functional groups "departments," derived from the French word for "separation." We call these departments "silos" because they become giant echo chambers - like a grain silo. The people inside the silo don't see the world outside. We will name the set of problems this situation causes "the silo problem."

Silos date back to General Motors in the 1920s. They were a tool to solve a specific problem for GM. GM had grown by acquisition. It needed to standardize the diverse systems that came from these acquisitions. Then, it needed to optimize each part of the system to start making a profit. Silos helped them do that so well that every manufacturer adopted this innovation.

While silos helped the manufacturers of the early 1900s, they also created challenges. Many management techniques evolved to address those problems. "Lean," "Agile," and "Scrum" are a few of the fixes that evolved on top of this old management structure. While these fixes are popular, they do not address the root cause of the problems.

As with command and control, even the military found that silos block execution and break trust.

Excessive planning—aka a "planning mindset"—is another outdated idea. Today, it tends toward fantasy and breaks trust.

Long-term plans become outdated fast. Plans over 90 days are rarely accurate. They rely on too many assumptions. Yearly budgets are still helpful but do not work well as fixed plans. Detailed long-term plans worked well enough when the world was slower to change. Volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity are part of today's reality. Military strategists and scholars call this "VUCA." It's easy to miss how much more VUCA exists today compared to when the models for planning evolved.

Consider that ChatGPT became known in November of 2022. That was the first mainstream access to large language models (LLMs), an application of AI. Twenty-two months later, AI/LLM adoption has exploded. The adoption curve of AI makes the adoption of the Internet look slow. And Internet adoption eclipsed everything that had come before it. For more examples of VUCA, consider the COVID lockdown or recent geopolitical instability. These were disruptive surprises for many businesses—all raised levels of uncertainty. There are many other examples as well.

I'll frame this difference with a thought experiment to show contrast. Imagine a 1920s fighter plane that represents the tools of that era. Imagine it is fighting against modern tools. In our thought experiment, think of any of the tools of modern warfare. The pilot in our thought experiment would lose the battle before he knew he was in one. That's how different the world is 100 years later; he doesn't even have the tools to know he is in a battle. And he would still lose if he did.

Detailed long-term planning techniques may have worked in less volatile times. But they involve too many assumptions about the future. When they break—and they always do—they break trust. Most tools invite people to create this type of complex plan.

Later, we will contrast this planning mindset with one that can adapt. We call that mindset a "preparing mindset."

Adding the word "strategic" in front of plans and goals doesn't make them "good strategy"; it breaks trust.

Management thinkers often confuse and complicate things when it comes to strategy. A good strategy comes from a single focus: one thing that has the biggest impact. A good strategy organizes all resources around that focus. Bad strategy is everything and anything else.

People grab the word "strategic" to brand things that do not create a good strategy. They do this to make these practices sound important. For example, "strategic" is often used to indicate something that may not produce an impact for a long time. The implication is that a "strategic plan" or a "strategic objective" is good for strategy.

However, unless the plan or objective provides a "preparing mindset," it undermines strategy. Unless a strategic objective supports a singular focus, it is not strategic. Strategy execution fails most often because of conflicting priorities, according to research in the Harvard Business Review. Leaders create more conflicting priorities when they push for more planning, which breaks consistency in the trust equation.

Siloed information deserves special mention as something that breaks trust. Fragmented tools and data complicate decisions and create "work about work."

Many organizations rely on a patchwork of tools for different functions, leading to disconnected systems for different functions (HR, project management, or others). While integrations are available, there is rarely a simple way to see the data in the big-picture context. That makes it hard for employees to understand changes or to spot and surface problems.

The lack of context results in inconsistent data. People must then spend time reconciling information. We call this process of reconciling "work about work." Time spent fixing inconsistencies and doing work about work breaks trust.

Avoid these traps so your efforts to build trust can succeed.

I've outlined some ways current tools break the trust equation. Next, we will look at how leaders can create and build trust.