Non-Naive Trust Dance

The Non-Naive Trust Dance is a framework for making sense of all interactions between learning systems. Learning systems includes organisms, such as me (the person writing this sentence) and you (the person reading it) and dogs, cats, etc... and also includes bureaucracies, families, movements, and even worldviews or ideologies.

By understanding how trust is built and learning how to respect distrust, you can come to more smoothly and sanely navigate many kinds of situations:

• when someone expects an apology from you
• giving feedback about something someone is avoiding looking at
• receiving feedback from others about your own blindspots
• falling in love and choosing a life partner
• disagreements about things that matter deeply
• learning environments demanding you go beyond your capabilities
• internal conflicts about motivation or decisions

Watch a video

Read a quick outline

• trust sure is important. it would be nice* if we knew the laws of trust-physics: in general what works and what doesn’t work for building trust. (* tbh it might be necessary for humanity’s survival)
• it’s tempting to try to build perpetual motion machines w/ trust (assuming trust in order to build trust) but this is impossible with the laws of trust-physics. but it seems possible (& awesome) to build engines!
• obviously trust-building is contextual. eg, in a tense meeting in Dune, a desert-dweller spits as a sign of respect (releasing precious water) and nearly gets killed when that’s interpreted as a sign of disrespect.
• so what can be said about trust-building in general? well, one of the most important things that CAN be said is that it’s extremely contextual!! and a remarkable amount follows from this, eg:
  • the only way to build trust with someone is by doing something that builds trust with them. however, they may seem to want you to do something that’s abhorrent or senseless to you, which you refuse to do. somehow what needs to be found is something that works for both/all parties. there is a remarkable open space of possibilities here if we can get out of the trap of being frustrated that our first attempts didn’t work as we’d hoped
• notice that the bolded line above is a self-evident statement; a tautology; something that’s true by definition. this is not a coincidence, because self-evident statements are another basis for building trust since anyone can confirm them for themselves (although of course we may have different interpretations of what the implications are, and that can get tricky)
• the central tautology to NNTD is “you can’t trust what you can’t trust” (this is kind of the same one as the previous). inherent to this idea is the reality, not quite a tautology but also pretty self-evident once you consider it, that different people trust differently. (different parts of people trust differently too).
• thus [me trusting something] and [you not trusting something] is not a contradiction in the slightest.
• what do I even mean by trust? a few lenses:
  • trust as an unquestioning attitude (from C. Thi Nguyen’s paper of that title)
  • trust as “what truth feels like in first person”
• we could describe naive trust as being an unquestioning attitude that comes from ignoring some sort of warning signs in order to deliberately adopt an unquestioning stance, and non-naive trust as an unquestioning attitude that comes from an absence of any warning signs, or having investigated the warning signs and discerned to one’s own integrated relaxed satisfaction that they’re not a big deal (or that one could handle the situation if the issue did occur)
• when I use “trust” I’m generally referring to non-naive trust, since naive trust is fake & flimsy
• I generally think in terms of trusting situations more than trusting “people”
• there is a logic to (non-naive) trust and how it scales up:
  • if I trust a situation (eg this salesperson to not be scamming us) and you don’t trust it, then we don’t trust it
  • if I trust it and you trust it, but we don’t trust that each other trusts it, then we still don’t trust it
  • if we have common-knowledge of our trust, then we trust it
• there’s a thing it feels like for this sync-up to occur
  • as an example, have you ever made a decision and there’s a clear sense of “yes this is obviously what we want”?
  • by contrast, have you ever made a decision and you’re left feeling either that something you care about wasn’t adequately incorporated into the tradeoff process, OR you feel like someone else isn’t actually totally satisfied with it?
• in general, trust-building works via respecting that distrust contains the wisdom that allows trust to be non-naive (ie sane & robust) and finding a way to respect & dance with it, vs trying to bypass it. quoth Aurelius: “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”
• since trust ~= subjective truth, this process is literally perceiving the world together

Go deeper

Here are links to some other NNTD writings:

• Non-Naive Trust Dance—why the name? (which unpacks each word in the name)
• NNTD Q&A (six concrete-ish questions about how NNTD may or may not be relevant)
• NNTD pith instructions exploration (it’s mostly a dialogue with a friend)
• Internal Trust Dancing case study 2: scheduling & cancelling dates

Here's my NNTD playlist on YouTube, featuring some 3-5 minute videos on specific topics, as well as some longer dialogues.

For how to apply the NNTD principles to building trust in a group (a co-living community, a team, a family, or other project) check out my manual How we get there.

Connect more with Malcolm

Hi, I'm Malcolm Ocean! The non-naive trust dance is not so much something I invented as discovered. And there are lots of related frameworks, theories, etc. But I collect mine under this particular name, for convenience. More on the general principle and the value of having different names for different frameworks here.

Best to reach me on twitter at @Malcolm_Ocean, although I less frequently engage on Facebook as well.

Want help sorting out some trust challenge, internal or interpersonal? Learn more and book a coaching session with me here

Looking for my Mating Dance course on how to do courtship and romance in a way that respects your own trust system? See mating.nonnaivetrust.dance.

Want to interview me on your podcast? I would love to talk to you. DM me on twitter or email podcast at this domain.