Trust is the foundation of any personal or professional relationship. Trust in government, major institutions, big business, non-government organizations and the media has been consistently eroding for years. But trust is imperative for resolving conflict and building consensus. Here you can find our viewpoints, musings, and curated content about this critically important topic of (re)building trust, particularly as it relates to trust in government and institutions. Topics range from why people don’t trust to how we can help to rebuild trust. These handpicked articles seek to educate and illuminate. We look forward to hearing what you think.
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The latest results from the ongoing Edelman Trust Barometer, as usual, don’t bode well for people’s perception of government. There were hopeful signs a couple of years back that people were starting to feel a little less cynical about government in general, but the pandemic seems to have taken ...
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COVID-19 has now killed more than 900,000 people in the United States. We knew what needed to be done to prevent many of those deaths, but victims were unwilling to take those steps. Knowing that COVID kills ten times as many people as the flu, people still defy the evidence, ...
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Trust is the lubricant that allows families, friends, groups, societies, governments and economies to function. We know that the level of trust in institutions of all kinds has been falling for years, but now we see more evidence that trust is failing everywhere. It won’t be easy to reverse this ...
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Sitting around knitting toaster covers the other night, I was thinking about what Fiona Hill and Newsweek magazine both are calling America’s Cold Civil War. The overall lack of empathy on display is beyond anything we’ve seen. It’s more than apparent that those of us who see other people as ...
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By most credible measurements, government continues its downward spiral as the least trusted of institutions by most people. But public servants might take heart in the fact that media (news) isn’t far behind in its loss of credibility. The partisan divide – meaning who on the political spectrum does or ...
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For more than three decades, we’ve talked about how critical trust and credibility is, especially in the public sector. And for more than three decades, that conversation has often been met with a lot of yawning and disinterest. Public sector manager/clients figured it wasn’t as if their school board or ...
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We know that for years, trust in big institutions has been eroding with big government being the least trusted of those institutions. We’ve also seen that government closest to the people has been traditionally more trusted than the federal government. Close means the people who put out fires, fix potholes ...
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I think we’ve reached the point where it’s pointless to waste time debating whether or not most people have lost faith in institutions and experts. They have. We have. Public engagement will be key for those institutions and experts to re-earn some semblance of credibility, which we all need if ...
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Criticizing, debating and railing at the government has been a favorite hobby of people the world over since government was invented. Now, in some times and places this might result in losing your actual, personal head, but thankfully we’re not there yet – as of today. As public trust in ...
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I’ve said before that the COVID-19 pandemic has been the biggest and most consequential risk communication failure of our time. Assessing relative risk is something that most of us do almost every day – can I make this left turn in time, do I buy the cheaper or the organic ...
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