Making Sense of Today's Ideas - June 3, 2003, 3:05 p.m.

Symposium: "A New Base for Corporate Relations: From Strategic Deceit to Trustworthy Action", Nokia House, Espoo Finland, Tuesday, June 3, 2003.

This digest was created in real-time during the meeting, based on the speaker's presentation(s) and comments from the audience. These should not be viewed as official transcripts of the meeting, but only as an interpretation by a single individual. Lapses, grammatical errors, and typing mistakes may not have been corrected. Questions about content should be directed to the originator. These notes have been contributed by David Ing (daviding@systemicbusiness.org) at the IBM Advanced Business Institute ( http://www.ibm.com/abi ).

Discussion

On Annaleena's presentation:  open relations based on trust, versus closed relationships based on trust.

• Granovetter's strong ties and weak ties - different context

Does trust have to be closed to be trustworthy?

Trust over bridge.

Network as a way of describing relationships - can't live without them.

Symmetric in relationships?

• Fast trust:  in this era, don't have long-term trust.
• Still need to build trust, even though it's fast.
• Incremental trust versus fast trust

Adult learning foundation:  trust as comfortable

• Helps people to predict behaviour

People tend to trust information from trusted sources

Trust as predictability:  trust a person to lie.

• Not necessarily only a positive view.

Trust as situational

• In portfolio, difficult to say you will trust.

In the new work environment, overloading of roles, so need to be more true to self.

• May need different contexts for trust in work life, and trust in family.

Partnering with competitors - industry associations and standards

• For 2 or 3 months, phoned weekly, check who was with us and against us.

Trust as an emergent property

Instead of trust, orient towards predisposition.

• Move back to culture
• Lenses on the world

Portfolio approach has been used previously, in a more limited context

• Customer selling process, and describing customers.
• With Finns, can't distinguish between types of customers.
• Tried cultural match:  is the customer a good fit on the innovative side?
• Takes more time to build innovation side than transactional side.
• Governance structure with top management, and 50-page contract, then joint development team.

Definition of trust is messy and unclear

• First on intention:  strategic deceit?  Can't design for win-lose.
• Then actions

Could also base a relationship on distrust, as well

On portfolio presentation:

• American-style presentation:  action items
• Could write about mistakes - a Finnish approach.
• There's something more behind the presentation
• When you believed something, it's hard to go beyond beliefs

Fast trust:

• Teacher with parent' child:  how is he doing?
• Response:  it's only been 3 months, I don't know.
• After 3 months, if you don't know the student, you're a bad student
• Perhaps instead it was a case of fast trust:  the teacher didn't the parent.

Social psychologists:  inter-group relations

• Whatever inter-group relation, always the same points, e.g. intent
• Multiple levels:  inter-group level, cultural level, individual level.

Trust based on weak signals and strong signals.

• Prisoner's dilemma

Always have this dilemma in a market economy.

Instead of trust, consider transparency

Problem with partnering with evolution, can specify profit, etc.

• If partnering happens on a short horizon, issue

Instead of looking at trust, could also look ar risk

• E.g. banker thinking about outsider:  as an officer of the company, accountability of an asset.
• If this goes wrong, I'm going to the jail.  Are you coming with me, or are you just going to visit me?

Discussion with J.T.:  how do you know your relationships are doing well?

• Qualitative, every 6 month checks.
• Problem, would like quantitative.

Does the group really believe in alliances?

Examples discussed this morning, in construction and automobiles, there's a finished product.  IBM I more typically, where it's a service industry.

• More sophistication required in the service sector
• e.g. can you put a relationship on ice, and not have it impact?