Trust Part 2: The Speed of a Network is Trust (post #5)
By Talia-Milgrom Elcott, Founder and Executive Director of 100Kin10
“To make any of the magic in networked impact happen, we need a foundation of trust.”
When I use to describe 100Kin10, I said we do three things:
- We inspire great organizations to apply to the network and make ambitious and above-and-beyond commitments to the 100Kin10 goal.
- We experiment with how to mobilize and support those diverse and strong organizations to succeed at their ambitious commitments.
- We map the grand challenges interfering with achieving our 100,000 excellent STEM teachers goal and align, mobilize, and activate our network to take up the hard work of chipping away at those long-standing and systemic challenges, so that those walking the road behind us have an easier way of it.
But the essential enzyme that makes the entire experiment of 100Kin10 possible was none other than: trust. Trust has always been a key ingredient of the 100Kin10approach to networked impact from its inception, but, until this summer, we hadn’t called it out as its own pillar in our work.
Why Trust?
As anyone who has tried it knows well, coalition work is complex. The vague promise of collective impact so often fails to live up to its rhetorical potential, undermined by the quotidian inefficiencies of collaboration. We understood that if 100Kin10 fails, it wouldn’t be in some dramatic meltdown, but because we would end up as some run-of-the-mill coalition whose ultimate value proposition is nothing more than the sum of its part.
In 2013, two years into this effort, we gathered all our partners, then just shy of 150, together in Chicago, and I asked them, straight up:
“Will it work?”
The answer, we knew, would depend on them. On whether they showed up and made this still-fledgling effort their own. On whether they relentlessly followed up on connections they made to learn from colleagues, and adapt new approaches, and share data. On whether they would do more than they would have done otherwise
For any of that to happen, they needed to trust us, and they needed to trust each other.
Otherwise, they’d be unwilling to share their vulnerabilities, and, without sharing vulnerabilities, there would be no authentic opportunities to learn. If the network couldn’t facilitate learning, then improvement would be impossible. And without generating opportunities for partners to improve their work, 100Kin10 would be only a collection of great organizations going about their work in occasional proximity to one another, not the genuine network of learning, improvement, and collective problem-solving that the call for 100,000 excellent STEM teachers demands that we be.
As I wrote in a piece for the Stanford Social Innovation Review, we believe that “the speed of a network is trust: The more trust, the faster you move.”
This is the case for trust. In the next post, I’ll talk about how we’ve intentionally built it into the design of 100Kin10, in everything from our data gathering to our annual summits, and I’ll share some of the evidence we look at to assess and improve upon the network’s TQ (or trust quotient).
