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How I think about this work
Two frameworks we built from experience. Neither came off a whiteboard. They are what thirty years of rooms left behind.
We publish these for a straightforward reason: information is no longer scarce. Anyone can have the model. However, it takes judgment to know which one applies, and experience to know how to execute it.
1 · Be the Guide, Not the Hero
Communities are the heroes of their own stories.
Organizations create value when they empower others to succeed rather than when they center themselves. Capacity building, shared ownership, community leadership, stakeholder empowerment. It also applies to me: I am the guide, and you are the one who has to stand up at the annual meeting.
Where this came from: Northwest Indian Broadcast News. Twenty-plus episodes over twenty-plus networks, and the segments that traveled furthest were always the ones where we shut up and let somebody tell their own story.
2 · The Trust Development Model
Trust arrives in stages, and cannot be requested.
Visibility, credibility, reliability, relationship, trust. Most try to leap straight from the first to the last. They become visible, then ask to be believed. The failure gets read as a communications problem when it is a sequencing problem.
Where this came from: watching a corporation that had said nothing to its community for three years call a single meeting and expect to be taken at its word. The meeting was well run. It failed anyway, and it was never going to do anything else.
And one principle that isn’t a framework
Trust is earned through consistency.
It is rarely built through a single campaign, event or announcement. Organizations gain credibility when their actions consistently match their stated values, over years, including when nobody is watching. A crisis is simply the moment that consistency gets audited.
I have never found a way to draw this one, which is probably appropriate.
Which of these is your situation?
Usually people arrive knowing something is wrong without knowing which of the two it is. Working that out is generally the first conversation.