I've been thinking a lot lately about how to scale Trust.

Tech solutions are great, but often gamed.

Identifying people who are trustworthy most of the time, is relatively easy. 

What's hard is cultivating disincentives to minimize the likelihood of untrustworthy behavior in edge cases.

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Principal at Cobalt Ventures. Write @ TheItinerant.io ; BenErsing.com Host: /venturecapital /finance /adventures

How one weights the various components of Trust is also variable.

A trustworthy person could mean something slightly different to me than to you.

Ultimately it's a group that defines it for itself. But with deep social ties disintegrating in the west, how are we then to address the Trust deficit that has emerged?

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Organizations that emphasized shared values, ethics, and vision. That went beyond religion, political affiliation, or ethnicity. 

But even then, many died out because of lost Trust. So that in itself isn’t the solution.

I’ll continue pulling on this thread.

In the meantime, what’s your take?

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[Cntd.]

What if the answer lies in the group admittance process more so than the behavioral incentives once admitted?

For example, no one is perfect - at some point everyone will violate Trust. 

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There is a difference though in how highly one places a premium on Trust and therefore their willingness to acknowledge and strive to rectify it when Trust has been lost.

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What if the answer then lies in helping these individuals find each other, and collectively agreeing on a process to pursue when someone feels Trust has been violated?

The value of rectifying Trust challenges and staying in the group, must then be greater than the value of rage quitting the group.

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Maybe the answer lies in looking backwards in order to move forward?

To the models underpinning the trusted civil society organizations of prior generations: the Elks, Masons, Knights Templar, Boy Scouts of America, etc. to name a few.

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