There is a moment when a survey is complete and the outcome is not what you had thought. The internal picture — what management assumes about how stakeholders think — deviates from what is said externally. That difference is uncomfortable, and the reflex is to explain it away: the question was framed wrong, the sample wasn't representative, the timing was unfortunate. Before you do anything with the outcome, it is worthwhile to first understand why that deviation almost always exists. You can read about that in why your picture deviates from that of your stakeholders.
The Trust Baseline is built around one comparison: an internal survey alongside an external stakeholder survey. Not to determine who is right, but to make visible the difference between what management thinks is going on and what is actually being said. That difference is the first outcome. Not a score, not a percentage — a picture of where the assumptions from the inside and the signals from the outside diverge.
That is a different exercise from asking how someone feels about your organisation. Feeling is not a measurement, and the difference between the two is often underestimated at the moment an outcome lands on the table that doesn't match expectations. You can read more about this in why feeling is not a measurement and what you do with the difference.
It is important to keep the boundary sharp. The Trust Baseline says nothing about what a stakeholder thinks — we do not know that until they say it themselves. What we bring into view is the difference between the internal assumption and the external signal. If that difference is large, that is an indication that something needs to be investigated, not a statement about what exactly is wrong or with whom. How you measure trust without asking directly those who are already positive is described in how do you measure trust without asking those who are already positive.
If the internal expectation turns out higher than the external signal, the first question is not who is right. The question is what happened between what was promised and what was observed. Often the difference does not lie in major decisions, but in small commitments that were made and not kept. Failing to keep a small commitment costs more trust than not making a large investment — not because the investment is unimportant, but because a commitment creates an expectation that is measurable. That is precisely why this instrument includes a commitment tracker: not to register intentions, but to keep track of what was said and what became of it.
The Trust Baseline delivers the difference, the tracker and a signal rhythm — a recurring moment at which it is measured again whether the distance between the internal picture and the external signal is growing or shrinking. What you do with that information is not something this instrument makes a statement about. There is no tailored advice, no recommendation, no "you should". There is a structure that makes the question repeatable, so that an outcome you don't like is not reasoned away once but is seen again at the next measurement.
That repetition is also where the difference gains its value. One measurement shows a difference; a series of measurements shows whether that difference changes under the influence of what has been decided internally and said externally. Whether four departments talking to the same party have the same picture is a question that often only becomes visible when you place the difference side by side — more on this in what does it mean when four departments talk to the same party. The question of how you weigh stakeholder influence and being affected against each other also belongs in the same structure: see what is an influence-impact matrix and, more practically, how do you score influence.
The Trust Baseline is under construction. There is no dashboard you can open today and no report we can send you. Anyone interested can join the waiting list; we would rather write that something is still being built than offer something that does not yet exist.
A difference between the internal picture and the external signal often arises at moments when the organisation is also struggling with other questions about where capacity is going — who does which work, and whether that work aligns with what is expected on the outside. For that purpose, separate from this trust question, FTE TO AI has a work scan that maps out, per task, which part of the work is eligible to be taken over by AI. For a CEO or CSO wondering where the organisation is spending time and attention while stakeholder trust is being measured, that scan is an additional point from which to look at their own organisation.
Vraag maar. Het interessantste antwoord komt meestal van wie u nog niet heeft gesproken.
Answers come from this site’s knowledge base. Not tailored advice, and not a scan of your company.