Trust over metrics: a federal experiment
The test
Could a philosophy that refuses KPIs survive contact with federal reporting requirements? We ran that test — grant window 2023-2026 (CV records); active project period 2024-2025 per the final report. The Future Travel Foresight Catalyst project — sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s University Transportation Centers Program through the National Center for Understanding Future Travel Behavior and Demand, with Andrew Maynard as PI and Sean Leahy co-designing and co-hosting the engagement work — set out to catalyze public and expert conversations about transportation futures using the initiative’s platforms: the Substack, the Modem Futura podcast, the Pizza and a Slice of Future class, partnerships, and earned media. The initiative was the project’s formal collaborator and infrastructure (final report, Maynard & Leahy, August 2025, published at rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/91942 — note: this page blocks automated fetchers; the quotes below are verbatim from the authors’ final manuscript of the report, which may differ slightly from the published version, and this corpus carries the report’s content on that basis).
What the report says, in its own words
The project deliberately declined to organize itself around quantitative KPIs — and said so, in a federal final report:
“In designing the project, we anticipated that hard quantitative KPIs would be both difficult and inadequate to capture what we’re really looking for.” (§4)
“Our outputs look very different: conversations sparked, minds opened, networks formed.” (§4)
“In effect, our methodology treats audience relationships as the primary outcome, under the theory that those relationships will generate and spread new ideas in ways no white paper or webinar ever could.” (§2)
“We learned to measure success in trust and relationships, not in clicks or citations. … It’s like planting an orchard, not growing annual crops.” (§5.4.1)
The report is candid about the cost of this stance: slow, non-linear audience growth; colleagues who read media-based outreach as “just media”; stakeholders who want immediate, quantifiable returns (§5.2). It answers with method, not apology — combining qualitative evidence (case anecdotes, testimonials) with proxy indicators, “while reminding partners that meaningful cultural impact is inherently long-term” (§5.2.5).
Why this matters
The significance is easy to miss, so we state it explicitly: a U.S. federal report now documents the initiative’s trust-over-metrics approach as transferable methodology. The abstract offers it as “a replicable model for agencies and institutions seeking to engage diverse stakeholders in complex sociotechnical challenges” — with lessons headlined as “the value of prioritizing trust over metrics, the effectiveness of authentic voices in expert communication, and the necessity of treating audience engagement as infrastructure requiring sustained investment.” Our non-KPI stance is not an ad-hoc preference; it is written into the federal record as a model others can adopt.
The report also notes what the model produced within the project period: engaged communities, trusted channels, “evidence of influence among key stakeholders and thought leaders” (abstract), external partners proactively reaching out, and “confidential feedback from influential readers that shows the catalyst effect in action” (§4) — impact primarily qualitative and long-term, exactly as designed.
The report, section by section
This file is the corpus’s canonical home for the report’s content (digested from the authors’ final manuscript). A compact map:
- Rationale (§1): a deliberate divergence from conventional research dissemination — catalyzing public and expert conversations about transportation futures rather than publishing and moving on, at a moment when public trust in experts is shaky. The Future of Being Human initiative was the formal collaborator; the report calls the partnership “deeply instrumental.”
- Methodology — three pillars (§2): (1) transdisciplinarity and blurred boundaries — blurring “expert”/”public” and “research”/”storytelling,” treating the public as collaborators in sense-making, with the catalyst as a two-way bridge between research circles and the public sphere; (2) parasocial relationship-building — cultivating genuine one-sided audience bonds through consistency, authenticity, accessibility, and voice, framed as relational rather than transactional communication; (3) futures thinking frameworks — scenario thinking across possible, probable, and preferable futures, backcasting, and horizon scanning, asking questions rather than making predictions.
- Platforms and reach (§3): the Future of Being Human Substack (established 2023; 5,000+ subscribers, ~35,000 monthly views, readers in 120+ countries); the Modem Futura podcast (launched October 2024; ~10.5K unique downloads, heard in 88 countries by mid-2025 (per the published DOT final report)); a partnership with Prof. Jamey Wetmore’s Tech Skeptic Goes Electric; earned media commentary on autonomous-vehicle stories on Phoenix TV; the Pizza and a Slice of Future class as testbed, community outreach, and amplifier; and a project web hub. All figures are offered “while cautioning that these numbers are merely signals of potential reach, not definitive metrics of impact.”
- Catalytic momentum (§4): the report’s core impact argument — trust prioritized over visibility, the deliberate absence of traditional KPIs treated as notable in itself, outputs described as “conversations sparked, minds opened, networks formed,” and evidence including rising subscriptions and open rates, enthusiastic expert guests, external partners proactively reaching out, and confidential feedback from influential readers.
- Lessons (§5): successes and surprises — Substack growth exceeding expectations (fastest on non-transport topics), production quality as credibility infrastructure, YouTube Shorts as a low-cost reach multiplier, and convening rather than just broadcasting. Five named challenges: (1) gradual, non-linear audience growth (“empty-room syndrome”); (2) heterogeneous audience needs; (3) limited academic recognition of media-based outreach; (4) resource intensity of professional production; (5) difficulty of measuring short-term impact. Strategic adjustments — including the joint “Foresight Catalyst” appointment that embedded the project in the initiative’s infrastructure. And six pieces of advice to peers — play the long game and trust the process, prioritize relational indicators of success, adopt an “infrastructure” mindset toward platforms and audiences, maintain authenticity and humanity, and push institutions to count this work as scholarship — condensed in the report’s own closing as “be in it for the long haul, center relationships, collaborate widely, build for the future, and stay genuine.”
- Roadmap, 2026–27 (§6) — planned work, not completed: deeper integration with TBD research and USDOT strategic foresight (the project as “relay”), a formalized Tech Skeptic Goes Electric collaboration (~10 cross-posted pieces), an AI-assisted “Tech Futures Briefs” series (~10 briefs), and milestone commitments of at least four transportation-focused Substack posts and four transportation-themed podcast episodes.
Status and gaps
- Established fact: the project, its methodology, and every quote above are documented in the published final report (2025). The report also carries a formal use-of-AI statement — an early documented instance of the initiative’s human-AI collaborative drafting practice (see Identity).
- Active work: the report’s next-phase roadmap (2026–27) — deeper integration with USDOT strategic foresight, cross-postings, and AI-assisted “Tech Futures Briefs” — is planned continuation, not completed work.
- Which conversations were sparked, which minds opened, and which relationships formed — the specifics behind the report’s summary language — largely cannot be told publicly, and what can be told awaits elicitation.
What this evidences: the Philosophy stance in its hardest venue — trust over metrics held up under federal reporting, and came out the other side as a documented, replicable model.