Dear Organlearners,
Leo Minnigh <L.D.Minnigh@library.tudelft.nl> writes:
>The issue of trust in organizations is a regularly revived one on
>this list. And indeed, it is very important. But which sensors do
>we have to detect the trust in an organization? What could be a
>good trust detector? Is this detector the interpretation of words
>from others, spoken or written? Is it the look in someone's eyes?
>Is it the openness of the other, possibly demonstrated by their
>vulnerability and weaknesses? Could life contact be a possible
>trust detector?
Greetings Leo,
Thank you for your marvelous contribution.
I want to write less (number and length of contributions). But your
contribution is so important for me that I am compelled to respond to it.
A long time ago I described my own viewpoint to trust. In short, in the
late sixties I discovered that Scripture tells us clearly in more than a
hundred passages that a person should trust only God. This shocked me
because I was a very trusting person, believing that trust is essential to
humanness. I prayed to God to show me why and it took more than twenty
years to learn the reason. It all has to do with creativity.
Trust is concerned with the arrow (forward direction) of time, i.e. the
future and not the past. The creative course of time is to complexify
Creation. Thus trust is concerned with increasing complexity. When I trust
anything in creation (like a lifeless thing, an organism, a person, an
ecos or an abstract thought) it means that I assume that I will benefit
definitely from that thing rather than contributing self to my future
through my own creativity.
In other words, trust is logically an assumption about creativity, my own
creativity as well as creativity outside me. Most people consider
creativity as a property which only a few, some most or all humans have.
Some people consider creativity as a property which many mammals
(including humankind) have to a varying degree. I am one of a few who
consider creativity as a property of all Creation with many varying
degrees in innumerous manifestations. This is one of the assumptions in my
theory of "deep creativity".
The logical assumption which I make when trusting, is that I will benefit
from creativity somewhere in Creation rather than the Creator. Making and
assumption and reasoning from the content of it is essential to logical
reasoning. But it is also essential to make sure about the form (quality,
values) of such an assumption. Obviously, the most important assumption
for me to check upon, is my theory of "deep creativity". I can and have to
assume that my creativity will benefit from it, but I will have to
validate this assumption continually. This is an enormous task.
Furthermore, I will also have to check my assumption that trust is a
logical assumption about creativity which have to be validated
continually. From here it is "turtles all the way down".
Should creativity be constructive and benefical all the time anywhere in
Creation, then there is no reason for me to make an assumption about it
and thus resort to trust. But it is because creativity has also a harmfull
and destructive side to it that I have to assume the positive side rather
applies. Viewing creativity not only as a property of Creation, but also a
property with positive or negative outcomes, makes the theory of "deep
creativity" rather unique. It is so unusual that people find it difficult
to make contact with it. Thus they have a deep distrust in this theory.
Even more strange is that I encourage their distrust.
Whereas the concept "trust" is concerned with an "assumption" about or
INPUT of creativity, the concept "trustworthyness" is concerned with an
OUTPUT (like an observation or a conclusion) of creativity. After many
years of contemplation I am now pretty sure that the more constructive a
person's creativity, the more the trustworthyness of that person. In other
words, constructive creativity generates trustworthyness.
Life is about constructive creativity being more in command than
destructive creativity. It means that life generates trustworthyness.
That is why the saying goes "trust your life with it". The summit of
trustworthyness is when a person forsakes his/her own life to save the
live of others. This deed makes a person a hero. We have often discussed
leadership on this list. Recently Doc Holloway has again warned us that
leadership is not about the quantity (number) followers, but about
quality (values) brought to followers. One of the most important values of
leadership is the ability to perform heroic deeds. Unfortunately, heroic
leaders are pretty scarce.
An important thing which we can learn from logic, is not to confuse or
even swop the assumption of an argument with its conclusion. It leads to
many kinds of fallacies. This was a short while ago a topic in our ongoing
dialogue, introduced by John Gunkler. In other words, we should not
confuse trust with trustworthyness.
Leo, you asked "What could be a good trust detector?" One possibility is
"trustworthyness", one that I frequently make use of. I admire
"trustworthy" people, although I do not trust them.
Now for something practical rather than theoretical. In lieu of my
arguments above, a deeper going trust detector is "constructive
creativity". I have offered many contributions in which I have shown that
constructive creativity depends on the seven essentialities -- liveness,
sureness, wholeness, fruitfulness, spareness, otherness and openness.
These essentialities are the essential tools to create your own trust
detector. Consider, for example.
How much can you trust a person in terms of wholeness? How trustworthy is
a person who fragments at every possible opportunity for self interest?
Here is an interesting historical lesson. Gradually, through almost 300
years since 1652 (I prefer 1660), the Afrikaner people (immigrants and
descendants from mainly the Lowlands region in northern Europe) became
the most trustworthy of all peoples in Southern Africa (Africa south of
the Sahara). They were the people who had to marry European civilisation
with African civilisation because they had to live in Africa and not
Europe anywhere. They developed a culture rich with creativity in the
African context. Afrikaans became a language which could be heard from the
Cape Province in the south to Kenia, Rwanda, Uganda and the Congo in the
north. Afrikaans outreachers (missionaries, doctors, teachers, engineers,
civil servants, etc) became the most sought after people, vibrant with
trustwortyness. Read biographies, journey descriptions, reports to
benefactory organisations and articles in periodicles to validate this
statement.
Then the Afrikaners (or actually a secret society within them) engineered
the ideology of apartheid as the ultimate answer to a sustainable life for
Afrikaners (actually creating secure jobs for members of the secret
scociety). In 1948 they succeeded in making this ideology a policy. The
then prime minister who lost the election, was nobody else than Jan Smuts,
the spiritual father of holism. He was shattered. He was convinced that
the "whole" and not "natural selection" (Darwinianism) was the driving
force of evolution. He realised, more than anybody else, that apartheid
(fragmentarism) would cause specifically the devolution of the Afrikaner
people and generally the devolution of Southern Africa. But the majority
of the electorate (constituency rather than proportionally based) decided
to follow a different leader with the opposite message - fragement all the
walks of life of South Africans into predetermined boxes.
The last four years of Jan Smuts was the most searching of them all. By
losing the election, he realised that wholeness was not the only driving
force of evolution. At an age when most other people sit in the sun, he
resumed his most extraodinary studies like in his young days. He
desperately tried to perceive the other factors beside wholeness,
contibuting like wholeness, to evolution. But his time was too short.
It is now 50 years later. Apartheid came and went. Development in Southern
Africa took a downward trip which shocked the world from event to event.
But most importantly, the Afrikaner people lost their wel earned
trustworthyness all over Southern Africa, even in South Africa. They now
have to struggle to regain their constructive creativity. They are kicked
out from all walks of life (business, government, academy, arts, sport,
...), affirmative action (workers composition have to reflect the
ethnography of South Africa) being the most effective tool. They even have
to struggle to get their own language heard in their own country!
It is impossible to keep count the many times the past few years I have
heard or read the warning "Do not trust an Afrikaner". I smile, although
very sad, because the healing of my people has begun.
Are you a manager or a facilitator of an organisation who sustain and
adapts itself creatively? Do the income of your corporation depend on the
creativity and thus the learning of its workers? Do you keep your ears to
the ground, especially with organisations so large that they are called
multinational or international? Have you heard the warnings "Do not trust
XYZ any more!"? What kinds of counteractive steps have you taken? How much
do they contribute to constructive creativity? Or do you trust that the
things which you are now doing, have nothing to do with trustworthyness?
Leo, the second part of your contribution which begins with
>The culture in various countries and organizations differ greatly.
>But in some, life contact plays an important role.......
is just as important.
But to keep my contributions down in quantity, I hope to reply on it
somewhat later. What you have identified here, is what I prefer to call
"commutation". I have written on it many moons ago. Basically, commutation
is that which is essential to communication, communion, colaboration,
symbiosis, etc. Commutation is the interactive "sharing" of one or more
lesser complex systems between one or more more complex systems. For
example, a Learning Organisation without commutation is impossible,
although other organisations can function with little commutation.
>A warm greeting from a distance, accompanied with a virtual hug,
The same here to you all.
Best wishes
--At de Lange <amdelange@gold.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
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