When companies collaborate, low trust is detrimental to innovation. But so is very high trust. The optimal level, yielding maximum impact, lies in between.
A general assumption about innovation-oriented partnerships between companies is that success grows out of good relationships based on mutual trust, while poor cooperation and a lack of trust lead to disaster. Yet examples abound of high-trust partnerships that fail to innovate and of turbulent ones that succeed.
Is trust in fact overrated? Is it sometimes an actual hindrance to innovation? Can we think in terms of an optimal level of trust — not too little and not too much?
Because case studies are not adequate for evaluating correlations between the level of trust and innovativeness — it is impossible to disentangle trust from the many other contributing factors — we set up a series of experiments, using pairs of individuals who already knew each other and who had sufficient prior experience together so as to have formed distinct trust perceptions.
Results point to a major finding: As mutual trust increases, the partnership’s creativity goes up, reaches a maximum point and then starts to decline. Similarly for innovativeness. As mutual trust increases, innovativeness also goes up — but only to a certain point, after which innovativeness declines, even though it stays at higher levels because of greater commitment. We explain this seemingly strange pattern as follows: If a team enjoys a high level of trust and mutual caring, individuals might become too accommodating, quickly accepting their partners’ ideas and thus reducing the amount of dynamic task-oriented conflict. The team might then have lower creative tension, consequently reducing the partnership’s effectiveness. The bottom line: When inventing together, trust is good; but avoiding too much trust is better.
4 Comments On: Why Too Much Trust Is Death to Innovation
I’m not sure the article lives up to the headline.
I want to be careful how I phrase this, because the research is obviously carefully done by serious people, it’s a valid and interesting hypothesis, and if true, a matter of some practical interest. But, as I said, I think the case is far from proven.
If I read this carefully, it all hinges on a partial component of one aspect of trust. The aspect is trusting-ness (as opposed to trustworthiness). The component is empathy.
The critical paragraph seems to me to be this:
“Trust is a combination of integrity, reliability and mutual caring… mutual caring, or the extent to which one partner empathizes with the other, may result in excessive accommodations. Under such circumstances, a team member would prefer to please his partner than to openly question the partner’s ideas, decisions and actions.”
First of all, I’m not aware of any single agreed-upon definition of trust. It’s harder than obscenity to define. Second, the authors have apparently defined ‘trust’ without trying to distinguish between trusting, being trusted, or the proper use of ‘trust,’ which is the result of the former two.
And while that’s not an unreasonable definition, it’s hardly the only one. My own Trust Equation is explicitly about trustworthiness, and names four factors: credibility, reliability, intimacy, and self-orientation. I explicitly refer to empathy as a capability of one for being trustworthy, but not empathy in the sense the authors suggest.
They seem to equate empathy with a dissolving of the boundaries between individuals. Some psychologists use the term “differentiation” to describe the ability to empathize with another while precisely NOT losing the sense of one’s own identity.
In common terms, I’d say one who empathizes to the point of preferring to please his partner rather than openly question ideas is not empathizing, but capitulating. A preference to lose one’s own identity for the sake of approval of another indicates a serious lack of strength and personal identity, as well as a lack of interpersonal skills.
A simple view of Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence work suggests that what’s critical is the ability to see one’s own emotions and the emotions of others, and to work consciously on each. What the authors are characterizing as empathy is the inability to maintain the difference between one’s own emotions and those of another, and the absence of skills to manage either.
I would suggest this is not trust. A person who behaves in this way is not going to gain anyone’s trust–instead, they’ll be known as suck-ups without principles and integrity.
Full circle to innovation: a person who really has solid skills in trusting, and who is truly trustworthy, is skilled in the arts of empathy and in knowing their own points of view. It’s precisely those kinds of people who will draw out differences, secure in the notion that they’ve got the skills to handle the kinds of differences that lead to productive interactions.
At the very least, I think the headline far outruns the paper itself; and speaking personally, the conclusion doesn’t make sense to me.
Does too much trust deter innovation?
Our experience with innovation alliances in the last 20 years indicates that an abundance of the right kind of trust never hurts innovation, but with an important caveat:
High Trust Does Not Equal High Innovation
Reaping the fruits of collaborative innovation is like farming – while flowers need fertile soil to grow, we would never draw the conclusion that fertile soil is all that’s needed to produce a prosperous garden. Naturally, gardens also need sun, water, and highly competent gardeners. So with innovation – Trust is the fertile ground, but collaborative innovation is a discipline requiring competent players and high standards of performance.
The experiment cited in the article demonstrates a key fallibility in most people’s understanding of trust – that all high levels of trust are the same (they’re not).
High trust can manifest as either “harmony” or “synergy.” The former is blissful, sometimes even complacent, but not necessarily innovative; the latter is energetic, filled with tension, constantly pushing the edges of possibility. Synergistic trust exists in an environment of co-creation where the partners live in a perpetual state of enlightened dissatisfaction. Conflict is absent in harmonious trust, but very evident in synergistic trust, where ideas are being challenged daily. But the challengers honor each other’s intellects, and the conflict of ideas is used only to spur the mind to higher orders of thinking.
The greater the tension between differentials in thinking,
the greater the potential for explosive innovation.
For example, in our study of how the Greeks created the first age of innovation, several “essential ingredients” were necessary to create the phenomenal explosion of innovation from such as small city as Athens (population: 30-40,000). Some of the elements of that innovation formula included: pushing the limits of possibility, an endless pursuit of perfection, willingness to discover, dedication to honoring others, and a continuous stream of insightful questions.
Innovation alliances have made enormous progress over the last twenty years. However, the statistics on alliance success can easily be misleading. While many alliances do fail (twenty years ago it was 80%, now it’s considered 50%), alliance professionals who use best-practice alliance architecture regularly produce 70-80% success rates. Clearly, the disciplined application of professional standards to alliances has shifted the balance.
Further, what is considered a “success” or “failure” in innovation can be confusing. Eli Lilly, a company that has had enormous success in risky innovation alliances, distinguishes between the science and the alliance relationship. A failed technology innovation may still embody a successful alliance relationship, a factor that would instill confidence to proceed experimenting with another new technology with that partner, despite past failures on the science front.
As a last insight:
The mating of two trusting turkeys
An eagle doth not make
Robert Porter Lynch
Chairman Emeritus, Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals
Sweet spot – or data artifact? Click on “view exhibit” and look at the data set. If the last data point (trust = 14) is removed, the conclusions might be quite different. There might not be a valid basis to claim that a sweet spot exists. Further testing would be a good idea to support such a counter-intuitive claim. But if high trust is the result of apathy, then I guess it makes sense that apathetic teams wouldn’t create.
Nissan shifted from a disastrous harmonious trust to synergistic trust and produced remarkable results.
In 2000 Nissan was headed for bankruptcy. It had debt of $20 billion, was losing money, and only three of its 48 models were generating a profit. Carlos Goshen was sent in from Renault to protect its investment in Nissan. Goshen was viewed as an outsider by the media and parts of Nissan. He promised to resign if the company did not reach profitability by the end of the year.
Goshen’s plan called for maintaining its collaborative relationships with its supply chain, which made 80% of the vehicle, but shaking up the cozy relationships with suppliers, which had based their entire business philosophy on harmonious trust. Nissan was the victim of complacency, which showed up as poor product planning, drab styling, and unimaginative design, which were partly the responsibility of the suppliers who did not aspire to compete on a world-class basis.
Goshen shook up the supply base, opening it up to world class suppliers, as long as they were innovative, collaborative, and trustworthy. He wanted synergistic trust!
A similar relationship existed with Nissan’s dealerships, half of which were owned and staffed by Nissan managers, not independent entrepreneurs. The cozy, almost familial, harmonious relationship between the manufacturer and dealers exhibited the Japanese value of “wa” which means “harmony,” which is considered one of the highest values in Japanese culture. This harmony prevented the organization from tackling some of Nissan’s most pressing problems, namely their cars were stale, and out of tune with what customers wanted.
Harmonious trust, while laudable in a friendship, has a serious flaw when used in a partnership, alliance, merger, or cross-functional team in a highly competitive business environment. That flaw is the lack of urgency to execute quickly, flawlessly, and creatively. The veneer of harmony had glossed over serious flaws in Nissan’s business strategy, and also built a culture of continuous planning to make changes, but no willpower to put the changes into place. After years of attempting to get everyone’s buy-in, the financial and market position of Nissan had eroded to the crisis point. This was exacerbated by prior senior executive regimes that had built a hierarchical structure that isolated cross-functional interaction (an internal alliance), and slowed flow of valuable information from the field and from the shop floor to senior management.
The result: Since 2000, new models that have taken the marketplace by storm. And profitability was achieved within 12 months, and the company is now debt-free.