At the OTT Conference 2026, Héctor Cárdenas explored the uneasy relationship between trust, evidence and storytelling in contemporary policymaking. Drawing on COMEXI’s experience in Mexico, he reflected on how think tanks can navigate political pressures, fragmented audiences, and institutional tensions while remaining credible, pluralistic, and grounded in evidence.
In a keynote for the 2026 OTT Conference that combined humour, institutional self-reflection, and sharp political insight, Héctor explored one of the defining challenges facing think tanks today: how to remain trustworthy institutions in an increasingly fragmented and polarised information environment? He argued that producing evidence is no longer enough. In a world shaped by social media feeds, political identities, algorithms, podcasts, WhatsApp groups, and shrinking attention spans, evidence does not travel alone.
It travels through stories.
Héctor framed storytelling not as a communications exercise or branding strategy, but as a core strategic function for think tanks seeking to influence public debate and policymaking. “The challenge is no longer simply to produce knowledge,” he argued. “The challenge is to make knowledge matter.”
At the centre of his keynote was the idea of “trustworthy storytelling” — a discipline grounded in four principles: engagement, truthfulness, humility, and groundedness. Think tanks, he argued, must show up where people are, communicate in ways audiences can understand, remain honest about uncertainty and limitations, and root their narratives in political realities and lived experience. When any of those elements breaks down, trust begins to erode.
Trust and institutional identity
Reflecting on the experience of COMEXI, the Mexican Council on Foreign Relations, Héctor described how trust operates differently across four key relationships: members, partners, audiences, and governments.
With members, he stressed that trust is closely tied to institutional identity. Members may tolerate disagreement, but they struggle when organisations appear to drift away from the purpose and values they originally represented.
Drawing on COMEXI’s own experience, Héctor recounted how the institution became strongly associated with free trade debates roughly a decade ago. While this focus generated visibility and influence externally, internally some members felt the organisation’s identity had narrowed too much around a single narrative. The issue was not trade itself, but the perception that one story had come to dominate the institution.
In response, COMEXI undertook a deliberate effort to broaden its agenda and rebuild pluralism within the organisation. Through strategic planning processes and multiple working groups, the institution repositioned itself as a broader platform for international affairs and policy debate.
Héctor’s keynote highlighted an important tension many think tanks face: openness and pluralism are strengths, but too much unresolved disagreement can eventually create confusion rather than credibility. “Pluralism is an asset,” he reflected, “until it isn’t.”
Curating meaning in an age of information overload
Another lesson from COMEXI’s experience centred on the changing nature of information consumption.
Faced with increasingly overwhelmed audiences, the organisation developed curated newsletters focused on key geopolitical relationships, including the United States, China, and Europe. The value of these products, the speaker explained, was not that they contained unique information, but that they helped members interpret what mattered and why.
This distinction became one of Héctor’s keynote recurring themes. Think tanks are no longer competing primarily on access to information. They are competing on judgment, interpretation, and relevance. “Storytelling,” Héctor argued, “is the discipline of saying: here is the world, here is why it matters, and here is how we should understand it.”
Partnerships, competition, and co-producing credibility
Turning to relationships with partner organisations, particularly other think tanks, the keynote offered a candid assessment of the tensions between collaboration and competition.
While think tanks frequently speak about partnerships and collective work, Héctor noted that institutions also compete for donors, visibility, influence, and audiences. Trust between partners therefore depends less on goodwill and more on clarity: clear expectations, clear boundaries, and a shared understanding of institutional independence.
Héctor reflected on instances where partnerships became difficult because organisations held fundamentally different views about donor influence and institutional autonomy. Such differences, he argued, matter because think tanks are not simply co-producing events or publications; they are co-producing credibility.
The discussion also revisited broader lessons from policy history. Referencing debates surrounding the so-called Washington Consensus, Héctor noted that institutions can sometimes win intellectual arguments while simultaneously losing public trust. Policies may appear analytically coherent while failing to resonate politically or socially with the people expected to live with their consequences. This served as a warning against treating evidence as detached from political realities, social anxieties, or questions of distribution and fairness.
Audiences, attention, and the limits of simplification
One of Héctor’s keynote most compelling sections focused on audiences and the transformation of the public sphere.
He challenged the assumption that authority naturally generates attention. Today, many think tanks produce excellent reports and publications that receive little meaningful engagement. “Most think tanks,” Héctor joked, “don’t have audiences. We have artefacts.” He argued that audiences do not engage with evidence in neutral ways. Policymakers and citizens alike process information through identities, emotions, coalitions, institutional pressures, and political incentives.
Referencing work in political psychology and motivated reasoning, Héctor explained how framing can significantly affect whether audiences are willing to engage with particular policy ideas. The implication for think tanks is uncomfortable but unavoidable: evidence alone rarely changes minds.
At the same time, Héctor rejected the idea that newer communications formats are inherently incompatible with serious policy work. COMEXI has experimented with AI-generated podcasts and short-form video content to make its work more accessible to younger audiences.
However, he warned against reducing all communication to fast, highly simplified content optimised purely for visibility or virality. The problem, he argued, is not simplification itself, but the risk that simplification eventually undermines depth and credibility. The challenge is therefore one of sequencing rather than choosing between long-form and short-form communication. Short content may attract attention, but trust is built when audiences have somewhere deeper to go.
“Trust,” Héctor argued, “is not built at the level of attention. It is built at the level of follow-through.”
Governments, humility, and usable advice
Héctor concluded with reflections on think tanks’ relationships with governments.
Drawing on recent experiences in Mexico, he described a difficult environment in which trust between governments and civil society organisations has weakened significantly, including political pressure on some think tanks through the removal of tax-exempt status.
Against this backdrop, COMEXI has attempted to maintain relationships with government officials through a combination of candour, discretion, and consistent engagement. Closed-door conversations with policymakers serve not only as opportunities to share analysis, but also to better understand the political and institutional constraints under which governments operate.
A particularly striking point concerned the limits of traditional policy advice. Think tanks often move quickly from evidence to recommendations through neat analytical frameworks. Yet policymakers operate in environments shaped by bureaucracy, political coalitions, legal constraints, implementation bottlenecks, media pressure, and electoral realities. Advice that ignores those realities, Héctor warned, may be technically correct but politically unusable. This is where humility becomes essential. Understanding what governments can realistically implement — and the stories they already believe about a problem — is a necessary part of effective policy engagement.
At the same time, Héctor insisted that trust with governments cannot depend on silence or compliance. Think tanks must remain truthful in public while engaging responsibly in private.
Becoming strategic without losing credibility
Across all four relationships — members, partners, audiences, and governments — Héctor returned repeatedly to a central tension: think tanks must become more strategic communicators without sacrificing their integrity.
If think tanks refuse to engage in storytelling, less evidence-based actors will fill the vacuum. But if think tanks embrace storytelling carelessly, they risk becoming part of the same ecosystem of manipulation and disinformation they often criticise.
The task, therefore, is not to choose between evidence and narrative, but to tell stories that remain grounded in evidence, political realities, and intellectual honesty.
Héctor closed with a reminder that ideas matter only when they are heard, understood, and able to survive contact with politics and institutions.
“The task,” he concluded, “is to become strategic actors without ceasing to be trustworthy institutions.”