I’ve been thinking about two community engagement groups I worked with on a project where trust was already a little shaky.

Both groups had a session with a specialist engineer who had worked in his field for decades. He knew the region, and the national context having been the go-to engineer in his field across the country (little bit of a fangirl there!), understood its quirks and could explain the thinking behind the project in a way that made sense.

People asked questions and some pushed quite hard, which was to be expected. He was prepared for that. He answered patiently, explained how he had reached his conclusions and stayed open to being questioned. He never showed any resistance to questions, and always seemed curious about the questions he fielded and why people were asking them. There was a distinct feeling that there weren’t any dumb questions, which brought an inclusivity that doesn’t always happen.

You could feel something change.

Most people seemed to leave with greater confidence in the technical work and the person behind it. The questions changed and the general feeling around the project softened.

One person in each group remained firmly unconvinced.

And isn’t that always the way? Nine people appear to move and one person folds their arms. Guess who we spend the drive home talking about?

What had actually changed?

I need to be careful here because we didn’t measure trust before and after the sessions, so I can’t confidently say the engineer “built trust” with almost everyone. What I saw was a clear change in how most people responded to him and the technical information.

The trust research I’ve been digging through gives us a helpful way to think about this. When people decide whether someone is trustworthy, they are essentially asking a few fairly human questions.

Do you know what you’re doing?

Do you understand and care about what this means for me?

Will you do what you say you’ll do?

The engineer answered the first question very well. He had the experience, local knowledge and technical depth to explain what was happening and why. His patience helped answer some of the second question too. He took people seriously, and he didn’t rush them or become defensive when they challenged him.

For most of the group, that seemed to provide something they had been missing.

For the two people who remained unconvinced, I wonder if they were asking a different question altogether, or trying to convince him of their point of view and the solution they were gunning for.

Sometimes more detail answers the wrong question

Someone can believe the engineer knows exactly what he is doing and still distrust the project.

They might be thinking about the organisation’s history. Perhaps promises were made during an earlier version of the project and never kept. Maybe they had a poor experience on another project. Maybe the organisation only contacted them when it wanted something.

I’ve had people tell me directly, “I trust you, Margot. I don’t trust the organisation.”

I understand what they mean.

They believe I will listen, be straight with them and come back when I say I will. Their experience of the organisation has given them reasons to question whether decisions will be made fairly or whether today’s commitments will still hold when things get difficult.

Their trust in me can sit alongside their distrust of the organisation. Both can be true.

This uncomfortable disjoint is where project teams can get stuck.

Someone remains resistant, so we give them more information. They still aren’t convinced, so we bring another expert and add more detail. Everyone becomes increasingly frustrated because we keep answering a question they may never have asked.

If they doubt the technical work, a credible expert may help enormously.

If they doubt the organisation will keep its word, another graph is unlikely to get us very far.

The person who didn’t move

Years ago, I attended training with Dr Jess Berentson-Shaw from what was then The Workshop. Dr Jess is now independent, look her up - she does amazing work. Yes... fangirling again. She talked about the “movable middle”, and the idea has stayed with me ever since.

Imagine public opinion sitting across a bell curve.

At one end are people who already strongly support the issue. At the other are people whose opposition is firmly established. In the middle is a much larger group who are open to understanding the issue differently when we give them a clear explanation and help them follow how and why something happens.

It made me realise how much time we can spend trying to shift the people at the very edge of the curve. Those voices tend to be loud, persistent and difficult to ignore. Sometimes they are influential too, which can make us sink more time into their disagreements.

Meanwhile, the middle may have moved.

The person holding their position still matters because they may be pointing to a risk or experience the project needs to understand. They may also be judging a completely different part of the project from everyone else.

At the same time, we need to keep the wider group in view. One firmly held position can easily overshadow the progress made with everyone else.

In these two groups, nearly everyone seemed to come away with greater confidence in the technical work, yet one (loud) person in each held their position.

Perhaps they had reached the edge of what technical information could resolve. The more useful question became, “What are they actually asking us to prove?”

Trust can be a mixed bag

We often talk about stakeholder trust as though people either trust the project or they don’t.

The older I get the more I know to be true - real life is far messier, and we're often walking in a grey world rather than a binaries our brain loves to cling to.

Someone might trust the engineer’s expertise and question the project team’s judgement. They might trust the engagement lead and remain wary of senior management. They might believe the current chief executive and still remember what happened under the previous one.

They may trust everyone involved and still oppose the project.

That last one is important - Trust doesn’t guarantee agreement.

All of this makes stakeholder engagement tricky water to navigate. There is rarely one tidy explanation for what is happening, and there certainly isn’t a cookie-cutter answer that works with every person in every community.

Frameworks can help us know where to look, but experience helps us work out which part matters here, with these people and this history.

Before you reach for more facts

The next time someone remains unconvinced after a technical explanation, pause before booking another presentation. I go through these questions with myself:

• Ask yourself what they need to know.
• Are they wondering whether the project has the technical capability to deliver?
• Are they trying to work out whether the people involved understand what this means for them?
• Or are they looking at the organisation’s track record and asking whether they can rely on what they are being told?

Then look at the group as a whole - there's some more questions for you to go through:

• Who has shifted?
• What helped them?
• What remains unresolved?
• Is the most resistant voice revealing something important, or has it started to consume all the project’s attention?

If you wanted a neat formula you're in the wrong newsletter - however, these questions may help you respond to the concern that is actually sitting underneath the resistance.

Stakeholder engagement and human behaviour are nuanced, messy and endlessly interesting. I hope sharing some of my own experiences, scars and learning gives you a useful shortcut through yours.

Margot B
Trusted Voice in Authentic Engagement

PS: Think of the stakeholder who has received all the technical information and remains unconvinced. What might they actually be asking your project to prove?