Voice of the Customer: trust, sharing and the flow of ideas

How do you build a community or any relationship based on trust? And how much confidence in that trust must people have before they beginning sharing their challenges and goals?

I lead the Voice of the Customer community where I work and have been thinking on what are some of the key ingredients to a dynamic and robust community. Some of the ingredients are likely trust, confidence, empathy, a certain selflessness, expertise, amongst others. But I’ve think about, chew on the idea of trust recently because of an experience I had at our most recent voice of the customer event.

We know that there are events in an agile transformation that are both critical and challenging yet necessary for success. And by most, these events are viewed with reluctance and some dread. Some brave members have made attempts with different degrees of success and others are just beginning. What all share in common is a desire to hear what the other members of the community are doing. To a person, they all want to hear from everyone else. In fact, we conducted a survey and the request to hear from others was most highly rated.

I’ll only share when it’s perfect

So, I thought let's have a couple of our members share what they’ve learned. The few members I asked to participate were hesitant to share because:

they didn’t think they’d done it right
they were just getting started
they thought it was likely they might have to redo it

But, of course, this is exactly what their peers wanted to hear—that they weren’t alone in their struggle to get started or go back and improve.

Ultimately, I was able to convince a few members of our community to share. I chatted with each person and assured them that they weren’t alone either—that their community wanted to hear from them because they wanted to learn. They were bringing their expertise and we (the VoC team) were creating a space where they could feel confident and trust that their story would be respected.

More people sharing = more flow = more ideas

The vibrancy of any community or relationship is a show of trust and respect. And I think the confidence people have in their personal connections within a community are what enable the flow of ideas, knowledge, and creativity. If I don’t trust the group I’m a part of, I’m unlikely to share my knowledge or expertise. Why share my hard-earned wisdom with

I read an amazing book about the flow of ideas by Alex Pentland called Social Physics—get this book. It’s both horrifying how much data can be linked together and amazing because Alex tracks how ideas flow within teams, communities and countries. He also goes into detail about what types of groups generate better ideas than others. Think back to your last meetings. If only two out of a team of 8 or so are talking then you have a problem with idea generation and flow.

These ideas and are own surveys and observations will be used to build further confidence and trust so as to create the conditions for more sharing. The next step is to ensure more voices are heard.