A Trust Score Cannot Tell You What to Repair

A board receives a new trust score. Leaders immediately ask whether it has risen or fallen, how they compare with another institution and which message might improve the next result. Yet the same percentage may contain very different realities. One person distrusts the institution because a service repeatedly failed. Another is dissatisfied with a lawful decision but still trusts the process. A third fears retaliation and gives the safest answer. A fourth has never dealt with the institution at all.

The score matters because it records how people report a consequential expectation: whether an institution will act in ways that are competent and beneficial. But the number cannot by itself identify what happened, which authority can respond or whether more trust would be deserved.

A trust score cannot tell you what to repair. Responsible leadership measures trust together with its drivers, examines differences across people and institutions, protects healthy scrutiny, joins perception with operating evidence and assigns action to the part of the system that created the experience.

On 16 September 2026, the OECD published its Updated Guidelines on Measuring Trust and Trust Drivers in Public Institutions. The 102-page technical report is intended to help national statistical offices and international organisations collect comparable, high-quality governance statistics. It builds on the 2017 guidelines and a decade of survey experience, and it describes a transition from experimental…