Creating the conditions for a cultural transformation takes all the tools at your disposal. You can’t, for example, command an internally focused culture to magically metamorphose into one that canonizes its customers. You have to nudge, suggest, cajole, and ultimately convince people that the new environment you’re proposing really is the best one for the business and, perhaps more important, for themselves. That takes time - and a good sense of timing.

Some leaders look back on their first hundred days and say, “If I could do it again, I wouldn’t hesitate so long to make those key people changes or that strategic move.” Others were glad they exercised restraint. In most cases the timing are dependent on the situation.

This book’s interest is to expand this approach to include a focus on mobilizing the settings of society themselves to foster successful integration. It sees these settings as having a capacity of their own, bottom-up, to foster successful integration— a capacity, perhaps underappreciated, to build trust across otherwise tenacious identity divides. It explores how to do this at several levels in society: in personal relationships and mentorships; in midsize settings like classrooms, sports teams, and small businesses; in larger institutions like universities and corporations; and in the overarching paradigms we use to design institutions like K-12 schooling.

5. Trust in the Face of Power

As I worked on the ideas in Churn, I felt certain things were becoming clear: that trust was indeed a critical ingredient of successful diversity in many of the everyday settings and relationships of our lives; that wiseness— seeing full humanity in human difference— was a mindset for winning trust between people of otherwise wary identities; that giving people the opportunity to tell you about their values, their needs, and their own agendas amounted to wiseness and was a usable strategy; that when giving feedback across identity divides, it was especially important to convey faith in the other party’s potential; and that follow-through, giving real help in achieving these things, was just as essential.

It wasn’t that I believed these things, even if implemented all together, would always and definitely eliminate diversity tension. Rather, my growing conviction was that they could reduce these tensions— provide traction against them— in our relationships and everyday settings and thus expand the approaches we had to address this central American challenge.

Was wiseness a strategy for everyone? Would people with less enfranchised identities, those occupying lesser roles in the Wilkerson play, be comfortable using it?

For these people— women, minorities, gays, white men in diversity workshops, low-income earners— hearing that they should offer “trust” in diverse settings could trigger more “remembering” than “forgetting.” And there waiting for them is a compelling argument: “How can I trust people from groups that have done bad things to my group, people who benefit from advantages won by those bad things, people who often justify those advantages with dehumanizing stereotypes of my group, people who often see my group’s progress not as a good thing, or as justice-restoring, but as a zero-sum loss? Wouldn’t being ‘wise’ just make me more vulnerable to them— women to men, Blacks to whites, gays to straights?” And their churn wouldn’t stop there. It would also ask: “Why does responsibility for building trust in these settings fall to me? Shouldn’t it be first the responsibility of the more empowered?

Power and status differences then, can frustrate trust building in a setting. And wiseness can counter that frustration. But for that to happen, it’s best that wiseness come first from the top. It’s too much to expect the vulnerable to risk further vulnerability by trusting first. (Though this can happen, as we shall shortly see.) Once leadership offers trust, like the wise feedback-giver in the Cohen experiment, it becomes a path the vulnerable can follow. So, the advice offered here is that in diverse settings— be it an interaction between a doctor and her patient, a lawyer and her client, a teacher as his students, an institution and its constituents, a business and its customers— the more empowered identity should lead with trust.