A local government builds a school near high-voltage power lines. Parents discover that the distance between the building and the power lines is 45 meters, not the 65 meters listed in the official plans. From that point on, any assurances given by the local government carry little weight, and asking parents to trust them would be pointless.
The story is true and serves as an illustration for an article published this year in the magazine Communication Theory by Aviv Barnoy, a researcher at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Instead of asking for trust, the local government made three decisions. It invited the regulator to install a radiation sensor at the school and made public, online, real-time measurements. It created an automated system that alerts parents and suspends school operations if radiation levels exceed the established limits. And it granted an independent expert—selected in consultation with parent representatives—the formal authority to demand new mitigation measures. Parents could continue to distrust the local government and still send their children to school.
Cooperating Without Having to Trust
Strategic communication has come to treat trust as both a prerequisite and a goal. Barnoy’s article challenges this premise based on a simple distinction. Trust is the willingness to accept vulnerability in the face of uncertainty. Practical dependence, or reliance, is the decision to cooperate, comply, or accept a proposal without this implying complete trust in the issuer. The second can exist without the first, provided there are other guarantees.
The term trustless comes from technology blockchain. O white paper The Bitcoin white paper, published in 2008, proposed a system based on cryptographic proof rather than trust. Barnoy points out that, even in the blockchain, trust remains: it shifts from people to systems and rules. And this shift is relevant to communication.
Three Ways to Reduce Reliance on Trust
The first approach is epistemic. It consists of making the statements that influence the decision verifiable by providing access to data, specifications, or procedures that the stakeholder You can verify this yourself, or have an independent party conduct the verification and make the findings public.
The second is structural and limits the leeway available to those who communicate. It involves commitments that are difficult to reverse, such as service guarantees, and mechanisms that make the cost of failure visible. The interviews conducted for the study include examples such as service errors that automatically trigger compensation for the customer.
The third is procedural and transfers the assurance outside the organization. It may be based on independent oversight—such as a regulator, an auditor, or an accrediting body—or on the participation of the individuals themselves stakeholders in defining what counts as evidence and the thresholds that trigger action.
In practice, these three approaches rarely occur in isolation. The professionals interviewed combine them, just as the local government did by combining the sensor with the automated system and the independent expert.
What Changes for Communicators
Since this is a theoretical article, and the seven semi-structured interviews that accompany it illustrate the model without measuring the frequency of the practices, the author himself acknowledges that it has limitations. Verifiability presupposes that the stakeholders have access to the evidence and the ability to analyze it, and there is a risk that it will degenerate into staged transparency, consisting of selective disclosure. The rigidity of the commitments may be perceived as overly legalistic. And independent oversight is effective only if it is recognized as independent and legitimate.
For communications professionals, the scope of their work expands beyond the message itself to include creating the conditions that make it verifiable. This involves working more closely with the legal, operations, and compliance, and accept that not everything one would like to assert can be proven. Barnoy is clear about the goal: to treat trust as one of several available tools. In many situations, it remains the most effective. When it is lacking, communication needs other ways to provide assurances, and the This Month's #SuccessSteps shows how to apply them in a B2B context.