# Trust over metrics

Trust over metrics is the Future of Being Human initiative's non-KPI philosophy stated as method: a working vocabulary — on the U.S. federal record — for doing, defending, and evaluating work whose most important effects refuse to be counted. Codified by Andrew Maynard and Sean Leahy in the final report of the USDOT-sponsored *Future Travel Foresight Catalyst* project (August 2025), it holds that trust, which grows slowly, beats visibility, which spikes and vanishes — and that when the yardsticks don't fit work that changes how people think, you change the yardsticks, not the work. This page codifies the vocabulary; [Trust over metrics: a federal experiment](impact-trust-over-metrics.md) tells the story of the federal test it survived, and [Philosophy](philosophy.md) states the stance it serves.

## The argument

The *Future Travel Foresight Catalyst* final report (Maynard & Leahy, August 2025) had a problem built into its genre. A federal final report is where a project tallies its outputs, and this project's outputs were designed not to tally: its method treats audience relationships, not deliverables, as the primary outcome. Rather than retrofit the work into borrowed KPIs, the report — writing in the authors' joint voice throughout — does something more transferable: it names, defines, and prices a working vocabulary for evaluating catalytic work. That vocabulary, term by term, is the argument.

**Trust over visibility** is the founding trade: "In this project we have chosen to prioritize trust, which grows slowly, over visibility, which can spike and vanish" (§4, 2025). Visibility is what conventional engagement metrics measure, and its dynamics are wrong for work aimed at durably changed thinking. The trade demotes numbers without hiding them: reach figures are reported "while cautioning that these numbers are merely signals of potential reach, not definitive metrics of impact," with "the true value lying in the connections and dialogues that emerge" from a growing community (§3, 2025). Hence the report's deliberately anti-viral arithmetic — a hundred deeply engaged podcast listeners can be more influential than ten thousand half-listening ones (§3, 2025), in part because "while numbers are easy to report, they often do not correlate well with effective reach and impact" (§2, 2025).

**Relational capital** names what trust accrues into. The Executive Summary is explicit: "The impact of this foundation is still unfolding and is not directly amenable to conventional short-term metrics," yet early signals "affirm that our trust-first approach is accruing 'relational capital' that will fuel transformative foresight in the years ahead" (Executive Summary, 2025). The accrual mechanism — consistency, authenticity, accessibility, voice — has its own page: [Parasocial communication](parasocial-communication.md).

**Audience as infrastructure** declares the asset class. "Just as you'd invest in a lab or a data center, invest in your communication platforms and relationships"; "building an audience is like building a network infrastructure; it has value beyond any single project"; and: "Think of your initiative as a platform others can plug into… That's infrastructure in a social sense: it's there for the community to use, not just for your project outputs" (§5.4.4, 2025). The frame does real argumentative work — it reclassifies an audience from a vanity number into long-haul capital, built slowly and there for others to build on.

**Success redefined**: "the absence of traditional KPIs is in itself notable. … Our outputs look very different: conversations sparked, minds opened, networks formed" (§4, 2025). The target is **second-order impact** — ideas that "spread through networks and mutate into new insights" (§2, 2025), with the real impact "often in quiet shifts of perspective among key people" (§4, 2025). The report's image is ripples in a pond: some visible immediately, others propagating quietly and surfacing later in unexpected places (§4, 2025). The time signature follows: "It's like planting an orchard, not growing annual crops" (§5.4.1, 2025) — or, at the scale of ideas, "more like seeding a forest (which can take generations to mature) than building a machine" (§2, 2025).

**Empty-room syndrome** is the named cost, and naming it is part of the method's honesty. Audience growth is slow and non-linear — the report's own label for this challenge (§5.2.1, 2025); stakeholders "sometimes request immediate, quantifiable returns" (§5.2.5, 2025); colleagues misread the work as "just media" (§5.2.3, 2025); and continually re-articulating why the approach matters is "a drag factor" the authors accept as part of their mission (§5.2.5, 2025). A model that asks institutions to give up their yardsticks prices in what that costs.

**Narrative evaluation** is the constructive answer to "then how do we know it's working?" Where conventional KPIs fail, evidence should be narrative: relational indicators — "engaged feedback, repeat audience engagement, partnerships formed, qualitative comments" — communicated as accomplishments, and stories collected, because one person's changed perspective can sometimes illustrate impact more vividly than any graph of web traffic: "Don't be shy to use narrative in evaluation—it's not all about numbers" (§5.4.2, 2025). In working form, that means qualitative evidence (case anecdotes, testimonials) combined with proxy indicators, "while reminding partners that meaningful cultural impact is inherently long-term" (§5.2.5, 2025). As §4 puts it: "The traditional yardsticks don't fully apply, but their alternatives are emerging in narrative form" (2025).

The initiative held this stance long before the project ([Philosophy](philosophy.md)); what the report adds is codification. A refusal of KPIs, stated alone, is easy to read as an excuse. Stated as a defined vocabulary with named costs and an evaluative alternative, in a co-authored federal report offered as "a replicable model for agencies and institutions" (Abstract, 2025), it becomes something an evaluator — human or AI — can actually use: ask not "where are the metrics?" but "where are the narratives, and do they hold up?"

## Lineage

- **2006 onward — the stance precedes its vocabulary.** Andrew's knowledge-mobilization media philosophy — be available, everything on the record, going uncited is fine when insight lands where it is useful — has been practice across 200+ documented engagements since 2006, and his teaching philosophy warns against letting "metrics of learning take the place of actual learning" ([Philosophy](philosophy.md); [Playgrounds, not playpens](playgrounds-not-playpens.md)).
- **2023 — the audience infrastructure begins accruing.** The [Future of Being Human Substack](https://www.futureofbeinghuman.com) is established (final report §3, 2025) — the platform the report would later describe in infrastructure terms.
- **September 2023 — the federal test begins.** The *Future Travel Foresight Catalyst* project starts under the USDOT University Transportation Centers Program via the National Center for Understanding Future Travel Behavior and Demand; the TRB Research-in-Progress record gives project dates September 2023 – May 2025 ([rip.trb.org/View/2440044](https://rip.trb.org/View/2440044)); the final report describes the active project period as 2024–2025.
- **October 2024 — the relational platform launches.** [Modem Futura](modem-futura.md) begins weekly long-form episodes — the platform whose engagement the report would later weigh against "the pure numbers game" (§3, 2025).
- **2025-05-25 — trust as permission.** Andrew publishes [Why parasocial communication around complex ideas is important – and why we need more of it](https://www.futureofbeinghuman.com/p/why-parasocial-communication-is-important) ([AI-readable mirror](https://text.futureofbeinghuman.com/substack/why-parasocial-communication-is-important.html)); the report quotes its core claim that trust "gives us permission to talk about what we know" (§2.2, 2025).
- **August 2025 — the vocabulary enters the federal record.** The final report (Maynard & Leahy, dated August 11, 2025) is published at [rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/91942](https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/91942), its abstract headlining "the value of prioritizing trust over metrics" among the project's key lessons.
- **2025-10-13 — the stance restated in public, in Andrew's recorded voice.** In the [Education Disrupted interview](https://stefanbauschard.substack.com/p/podcast-interview-dr-andrew-maynard), Andrew describes the initiative's returns as "not the hard sort of KPIs that you would usually get" but subtle, qualitative indications of transformed thinking.

## In their own words

From Maynard & Leahy, *Future Travel Foresight Catalyst* final report (August 2025; published at [rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/91942](https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/91942), which blocks automated fetchers — quotations verbatim from the authors' final manuscript):

> "In this project we have chosen to prioritize trust, which grows slowly, over visibility, which can spike and vanish." — §4, 2025

> "Yet despite reporting these figures, we are consciously refraining from playing the pure numbers game. We remind our stakeholders (and ourselves) that a podcast with 100 deeply engaged listeners can be more influential than one with 10,000 half-listening multitaskers." — §3, 2025

> "In practical terms, this means celebrating things like engaged feedback, repeat audience engagement, partnerships formed, qualitative comments—and communicating those as accomplishments. Such indicators, while soft, can be persuasive when you narrate why they matter. Encourage peers to collect stories: one person's changed perspective can sometimes illustrate impact more vividly than any graph of web traffic. Don't be shy to use narrative in evaluation—it's not all about numbers." — §5.4.2, 2025

## Engagement and reception

The vocabulary is young on the public record: the report has been public only since August 2025, and as of 2026-08-06 we know of no published independent evaluation, citation, or adoption of its trust-over-metrics framing. The report's own evidence of catalytic effect — enthusiastic expert guests, external partners proactively reaching out, "confidential feedback from influential readers" (§4, 2025) — is self-reported testimony, carried with that caveat on [Trust over metrics: a federal experiment](impact-trust-over-metrics.md). The nearest independent record of the stance itself is the *Education Disrupted* interview (2025-10-13; [stefanbauschard.substack.com](https://stefanbauschard.substack.com/p/podcast-interview-dr-andrew-maynard)): an unaffiliated platform electing to devote an episode to the initiative, including Andrew's non-KPI position in his own recorded words ([Reception](reception.md)).

## Where to go deeper

- **The source**: Maynard, A., & Leahy, S. (2025). *Future Travel Foresight Catalyst* (Final Project Report). School for the Future of Innovation in Society, Arizona State University; USDOT University Transportation Centers Program via the TBD National Center. Published August 2025 at [rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/91942](https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/91942) — the page blocks automated fetchers (HTTP 403); human readers can open it directly, and this corpus carries the report's substance.
- [Why parasocial communication around complex ideas is important – and why we need more of it](https://www.futureofbeinghuman.com/p/why-parasocial-communication-is-important) ([AI-readable mirror](https://text.futureofbeinghuman.com/substack/why-parasocial-communication-is-important.html)) — the trust-building mechanism as a standalone essay (2025-05-25).
- [Education Disrupted interview](https://stefanbauschard.substack.com/p/podcast-interview-dr-andrew-maynard) (2025-10-13) — the non-KPI stance in Andrew's recorded voice, on an independent platform.
- Related ideas-ring pages: [The Foresight Catalyst model](foresight-catalyst.md) — the method this vocabulary evaluates; [Parasocial communication](parasocial-communication.md) — how the trust is built; [Playgrounds, not playpens](playgrounds-not-playpens.md) — the same refusal to let measurement deform the work, in teaching.
- Related corpus pages: [Trust over metrics: a federal experiment](impact-trust-over-metrics.md) — the story of the federal test and the corpus's section-by-section carrier of the report; [Philosophy](philosophy.md) — why we don't do KPIs, stated as the initiative's load-bearing stance; [Reception](reception.md) — narrative evaluation practiced on this corpus's own record.