Trust: the starting point

Once upon a time, I was sent to a Management 101 course to learn how to do the job I was meant to already be doing. Over lunch, I met a lovely lady who managed a team supporting minority women to engage with women’s health services. She spoke about how a core part of their job was simply chatting with small groups of ladies within their own communities, creating safe spaces with women who understood them and their backgrounds, breaking down the educational, social and cultural barriers preventing them from seeking these services.

It got me thinking that my role was actually not that dissimilar. So much of what we do revolves around a good yarn over a cuppa tea and getting to know the people we work with. Who would have thought working with Mid-Canterbury farmers would have so much in common with women’s phee phees?

Different communities, different conversations—but the same starting point: trust.

The thing is, it doesn’t matter if we are talking about women’s health, driver behaviour or the day-to-day decisions made on farm – ultimately, we are just talking about the thought processes people go through when making decisions.

As a society, we often want regulators or authority figures to intervene when we think a decision is not in the best interests of the individual or the wider community. We create regulations, laws and guilt-inducing posters to get people to do the “right” thing.

But you can’t just go in there and tell people what to do (trust me, I’ve tried). If we, as a society, need people to change their thought processes, we first need enough trust for them to hear us.

We forget they probably have a very real reason that serves their own purpose for doing what they do, and they won’t simply change because we ask nicely or make a rule. We also forget that the most effective changes we want to see are driven by the people doing it. When people make the “right” choices for their own reasons, then we all win.

So much of this process comes down to who delivers the messaging recipients may not want to hear. My middle-aged male farmer boss (while an expert in facilitation) will get as much traction with those minority women to get a smear test as an inexperienced Green Party-voting townie will have with a reluctant farmer to change the way they farm.

We are entering a time of unprecedented overhaul of our local government entities who will oversee a fundamental change of our resource management system. We will have new approaches, tools, environmental standards and regulatory bodies, along with a whole new team of people taking care of all this.

New structures may change who holds the clipboard, but they won’t change the basic human equation: people are more likely to listen, engage and change when they trust the person and the system.

Who will they be? Will they be ready to listen to the needs of their communities? Will the new local government structures bring decision-makers closer to the people affected—or simply redraw the boxes on the organisational chart? Even worse, will splitting into multiple entities create unnecessary duplication and make it harder to engage?

Whatever it is we end up doing, I just hope these new entities see building trust within their communities as a core function they must deliver on.

“He aha te mea nui o te ao? He tāngata, he tāngata, he tāngata.”(What is the most important thing in the world? It is the people, it is the people, it is the people.)

Eva Harris is Principal Environmental Advisor for Enviro Collective