Regulators are a stakeholder group with a dual position. They assess whether you comply with the rules, and at the same time they form an image of your organisation that translates into the room you are given in borderline cases. That second image is what this article is about. Not the assessment itself, but the trust that precedes the assessment.
Most organisations set up contact with a regulator around compliance: reports, audits, correction requests. What is missing is a direct question to the regulator about how they see your organisation. Not as a formal request for a judgement, but as a question that helps you understand where the regulator's image diverges from your own image.
Three questions can be distinguished here.
First: what image does the regulator have of your compliance, apart from the formal reports. Regulators form an impression over the years, based on patterns in how you respond to questions, how quickly you correct, and whether you report yourself or only after a signal from outside. That impression is often independent of the latest report.
Second: what carries more weight than you think. For a regulator, what often counts is not the scale of a violation, but whether that violation fits a pattern or appears to be an exception. A small deviation that repeats itself is read differently than a large deviation that occurs once and is reported immediately.
Third: where is the room for interpretation. Regulations often leave margin for explanation. The question to the regulator is then not whether something is permitted, but how they view the intention behind an action when the letter of the rule allows multiple readings.
Anyone who engages in a structured conversation with a regulator about trust for the first time, rather than about compliance, often notices two things.
The first is that regulators rarely respond to the scale of a misstep. They respond to the pattern of how an organisation deals with signals. An organisation that reports itself, corrects itself and reports back itself builds a different image than an organisation that only responds after an enforcement action, even if the underlying violation is comparable.
The second is that the internal image of one's own compliance status is often more positive than the image the regulator has built up. That difference does not arise because one of the two parties is incorrectly informed, but because internal teams know the context of a decision while the regulator only sees the result. That knowledge of context distorts the self-image.
The Trust Baseline is built to make this difference visible, not to explain or solve it. The setup is the same for every stakeholder group: an internal survey of how management thinks the regulator sees the organisation, alongside an external survey of the regulator itself. The difference between those two images is the first outcome.
What we do not do is formulate a statement about what a regulator actually thinks before they have said so themselves. An internal estimate of the regulator's image is an assumption, even when that estimate is made by people with years of experience in the contact. The survey replaces that assumption with a measured difference.
In addition, a commitment tracker keeps track of which commitments have been made towards a regulator and whether they have been honoured. This is more relevant than it seems. A small commitment that is not honoured, an adjusted reporting deadline, a promised internal check, costs more trust than not making a large investment that no one had expected. Regulators remember missed small agreements longer than missed large ambitions, because small agreements are the direct touchstone for the question of whether an organisation does what it says.
Finally, a signal rhythm ensures that this survey does not remain a one-off exercise, but is repeated at a moment that fits the nature of the oversight: after a reporting period, after a change in regulations, or after a period without contact.
Regulators are one of several groups for which this system has been set up. Similar questions apply to what you want to know from advocacy groups, to what you want to know from financiers, and to the structured conversations aimed at local residents and at employees. Anyone who wants to know how the method as a whole is built up can read what a Trust Baseline precisely measures.
The Trust Baseline is under construction. There is no working product yet that you can deploy today for the conversation with a regulator. Anyone interested in this can sign up for the waiting list; we prefer to write honestly about what does not yet exist rather than offer something that does not yet exist.
Mapping out the conversation with a regulator often raises a follow-up question: how much of the internal work around reporting, monitoring and case file management for oversight actually needs to be done by people. The work scan of FTE TO AI calculates per task which part of it can be taken over by AI, regardless of how you organise the conversation with the regulator itself.
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.