Every November, IoIC holds what’s come to be known as the Insight Seminar in central London. It follows the ICon Awards presentations and our annual reveal of the Internal Communicator of the Year. This year that accolade went to Jane Lawrence, who leads a capable and creative team at Northumbrian Water. Still buoyed by the celebratory mood of the award winners during the presentation lunch, we then settled in for the more cerebral pleasures of the seminar. This year’s theme was trust. It followed the publication of well-received research exploring leadership, trust and communication, in which IoIC collaborated with University of Westminster and sponsor Top Banana, which published the report.

An excellent opening statement from Nick Howard took delegates through key insights from the Edelman Trust Barometer, which has become the gold standard index of trust in institutions. Supplies of trust have fallen across the board lately in response to hardship, corruption, fraud, conflicts, mass upheavals and climate change. In the corporate world, the public trusts chief executives and regulators to tell the truth about an organisation’s health much less than it trusts employees and technical experts (although the latter’s stock may well have fallen in the automotive sector in light of revelations at Volkswagen – we’ll know when the next Edelman Barometer is published in 2016).

Anth Burrows from Allied Irish Bank had delegates in rapt attention with an account of AIB’s spectacular (but by no means unique) fall from grace in employee esteem during the Irish banking sector meltdown, which hit AIB’s workforce with particular severity (other national banking sector meltdowns also available at the time, as we note only too ruefully from this side of the Irish Sea).

Matt Stephens from Quest made a case for instant polling, quoting from the Wall Street Journal that short, frequent employee polls catch issues as they happen and before they are allowed to fester, as opposed to long and potentially trust-eroding intervals between annual opinion surveys and follow-up action.

The University of Westminster report’s co-author, Katalin Illes, closed with a tour de force canter through some of the report’s themes and intrigued delegates with the need to keep a “cocktail of hormones” (cortisol, testosterone and oxytocin) in balance in order to keep the big picture in view and retain a sense of connectedness (Careful with the cortisol, too much and we withdraw into ourselves, apparently. Be warned.). It was, in sum, an exceptional afternoon and an Insight Seminar worthy of the name.

As a coda to this month’s thoughts, I’ll switch to another setting, Manchester’s newly refurbished Whitworth Gallery. Among the works is an installation composed of texts. One caught my eye, “I’ve been a feminist since I was five. We were living in Madrid then, during the last days of the dictatorship. My father was a Republican. He taught me about equality. Still, at Christmas, he gave my brother a big, red, French-Spanish dictionary. And I got a book on fairies.” It struck me for several reasons. First, for what it said about the too-common gap between what we say we believe in and what we actually do. (Internal communication sage Bill Quirke once also noted that CEOs say they want strategy from their IC practitioners, but ask for newsletters). Second, because it made its point in narrative form, a story in just 50 words, leaving no doubt about the writer’s argument but leaving readers to relate it to their own lives and beliefs. And that’s a kind of trust.

Steve Doswell is chief executive of the Institute of Internal Communication