Trust is one of the most frequently invoked and least examined concepts in the think tank world.
We talk about it constantly. Institutions need trust. Democracies need trust. Policymakers need trust. Think tanks certainly need trust. It is often presented as one of our most valuable assets, something to be protected, cultivated, and defended. Yet when we look more closely, trust proves surprisingly difficult to define.
It is not simply confidence in the accuracy of information. Many people trust institutions with which they regularly disagree. Nor is it merely agreement with a particular worldview. Some of the organisations we trust most are those that occasionally challenge our assumptions and force us to confront uncomfortable realities.
In practice, trust seems to involve something deeper: a belief that an institution is acting in good faith, that it is intellectually honest, that it understands the world it seeks to influence, and that it will remain recognisable even as circumstances change.
These reflections emerged from a conversation at the recent On Think Tanks Conference in Rabat, but they have occupied my thinking for some time. They arise from my experience leading the Mexican Council on Foreign Relations (COMEXI), from my work in public policy and government reform, and from a growing sense that the challenge confronting think tanks today is not merely one of communication. It is a challenge to our role as intermediaries between knowledge, public debate, and decision-making.
For decades, think tanks occupied a relatively privileged position in the ecosystem of ideas. We produced research, interpreted evidence, convened experts, and translated specialised knowledge into forms that policymakers, journalists, and informed citizens could use. We were not the only actors performing this function, but we were among the most important.
Today, that intermediary role is under pressure from multiple directions.
Political polarisation has eroded trust in many institutions that previously served as common reference points. Media fragmentation has produced audiences that increasingly inhabit separate informational worlds. Governments in many countries have become more sceptical of independent expertise, while civic space has narrowed in ways that complicate engagement between policy institutions and public authorities. At the same time, digital platforms reward certainty over nuance, speed over reflection, and emotional resonance over analytical rigour.
Artificial intelligence is likely to intensify these dynamics. The cost of producing apparently authoritative content is rapidly approaching zero. Information is becoming abundant. Summaries are becoming abundant. Analysis itself is becoming abundant. What remains scarce is trust.
In such an environment, the traditional assumption that evidence speaks for itself has become increasingly difficult to sustain.
Evidence rarely travels alone. It travels through narratives, identities, values, interests, fears, loyalties, and political constraints. It travels through social networks, podcasts, short videos, conversations among peers, and increasingly through algorithmic systems that determine what people encounter and what they ignore. Whether we like it or not, evidence reaches audiences through stories.
For many think tanks, that observation is uncomfortable. Storytelling can sound suspiciously close to advocacy, marketing, or political persuasion. We worry—often correctly—that narratives can oversimplify complex realities and that emotional appeals can crowd out careful analysis.
Yet refusing to engage with storytelling does not exempt us from its effects. It merely means that others will shape the narratives within which our evidence is interpreted.
The question, therefore, is not whether think tanks should tell stories. The question is how to do so without sacrificing the trust on which our legitimacy ultimately depends.
Over the past several years, I have come to think of this challenge as one of trustworthy storytelling.
Trustworthy storytelling rests on four disciplines: engagement, truthfulness, humility, and groundedness.
Engagement means showing up where people are rather than expecting them to come to us. This may seem obvious, yet many think tanks still communicate as if authority naturally generates attention. For much of the twentieth century, that assumption was often valid. Today it is not. Attention has become a scarce resource, and audiences are overwhelmed by information. Institutions that fail to adapt to changing modes of communication risk becoming invisible regardless of the quality of their work.
Truthfulness sounds straightforward, but it is often the hardest discipline to maintain. The temptation to simplify, exaggerate, or selectively frame evidence in ways that enhance visibility is ever-present. In highly polarised environments, institutions are frequently rewarded for confirming existing beliefs rather than challenging them. Yet trust depends precisely on the willingness to resist those incentives. The moment audiences conclude that an institution is shaping evidence to fit a preferred narrative, trust begins to erode.
Humility is perhaps the least fashionable of the four disciplines. Public debate increasingly rewards certainty. Social media rewards certainty. Politics rewards certainty. But most of the problems think tanks work on are characterised by uncertainty, incomplete information, competing values, and genuine ambiguity. Acknowledging those realities does not weaken credibility. Properly understood, it strengthens it. Institutions that are honest about what they do not know often become more trustworthy than those that always appear to have ready answers.
Finally, there is groundedness. This may be the most important and most neglected discipline of all. Groundedness requires connecting ideas to political realities, implementation constraints, institutional capacities, and lived experience. It means understanding not only whether an idea is analytically sound but whether it can survive contact with the world.
These four disciplines are not abstract principles. They emerge repeatedly in the everyday work of think tanks.
One lesson we learned at COMEXI concerns the relationship between trust and institutional identity. Several years ago, many members began to perceive the organisation primarily through the lens of trade policy and, more specifically, through a particular narrative about trade. The issue was not that trade lacked importance. It was that a single story had gradually become identified with the institution itself.
Externally, that narrative was often effective. It provided coherence, visibility, and influence. Internally, however, some members felt that the institution’s identity had narrowed and that alternative perspectives had less room to coexist.
The experience taught us something important. Members can tolerate disagreement surprisingly well. What they struggle with is identity drift.
This challenge is hardly unique to COMEXI. Many think tanks today are navigating tensions between intellectual coherence and pluralism, between clarity of purpose and openness to competing viewpoints. The stories institutions tell about themselves matter because they help define who belongs, what kinds of disagreements are legitimate, and how diverse perspectives fit within a common mission.
Partnerships raise similar questions. Think tanks often describe collaboration as an unqualified good, but collaboration is ultimately an exercise in shared credibility. A joint event or publication is relatively easy to organise. Constructing a shared narrative is considerably more difficult.
The most productive partnerships are not necessarily those characterised by the greatest agreement. They are those in which institutions trust one another enough to challenge assumptions, expose blind spots, and test arguments before they enter the public sphere. Good partners widen the story. They force us out of our intellectual habits and remind us that analytically elegant ideas can fail when they lose touch with social realities.
This lesson has become particularly visible in policy areas such as globalisation, migration, and economic reform. There are numerous examples of policy frameworks that were supported by substantial evidence and generated important benefits, yet struggled politically because they failed to engage sufficiently with the fears, identities, and lived experiences of those expected to support them. A story can be analytically compelling and politically unsuccessful. It can be true in important respects and still fail to persuade.
The challenge becomes even more acute when we consider audiences.
One of the recurring themes at the Rabat conference was the growing anxiety many think tanks feel about the changing information environment. Podcasts, short-form video, AI-generated content, social media platforms, and new communication formats have disrupted traditional assumptions about how ideas circulate.
Much of the discussion focuses on the risks of simplification. Those risks are real. But I increasingly suspect that the greater danger is invisibility.
No one distrusts content they never encounter.
This does not mean think tanks should abandon long-form research or intellectual depth. On the contrary, those functions remain essential. The challenge is sequencing. Short-form communication may create an invitation. It may attract attention, generate curiosity, or provide an entry point into a complex issue. Trust, however, is built only if there is somewhere deeper to go.
Storytelling is not about adding more information. It is about carefully curating what is worth saying.
That distinction becomes particularly important in the age of artificial intelligence. As AI systems become increasingly capable of generating summaries, reports, analyses, and even policy recommendations, the comparative advantage of think tanks is unlikely to lie in producing information alone. It may instead lie in exercising judgment: deciding what matters, identifying what is missing, contextualising evidence, challenging prevailing assumptions, and helping audiences navigate competing interpretations of reality.
The future value of think tanks may depend less on possessing information than on being trusted curators of meaning.
This brings us to governments.
Think tanks often imagine influence as a relatively linear process. Research produces evidence. Evidence informs recommendations. Recommendations shape decisions.
In reality, policy influence is rarely so straightforward.
Decision-makers operate within political coalitions, bureaucratic structures, legal constraints, budget realities, implementation challenges, media narratives, and electoral pressures. Recommendations that ignore those realities may be technically correct and practically irrelevant.
One of the most useful reminders from the Rabat discussions was that think tanks should be careful not to move too quickly from analysis to advice.
Advice is not influence.
Technically correct advice that ignores implementation capacity is not necessarily courageous. It may simply be incomplete. Similarly, recommendations that fail to account for political realities are not always signs of independence. Sometimes they reflect a lack of understanding of the environment in which decisions are made.
This does not mean that think tanks should soften criticism or compromise their integrity. It means that influence requires more than evidence. It requires understanding the context in which ideas must survive. It requires listening as well as speaking. And it requires sufficient humility to recognise that decision-makers often face constraints that are invisible from the outside.
Ultimately, the challenge facing think tanks today is not to choose between evidence and storytelling.
The challenge is to tell stories that are persuasive because they are truthful, accessible because they are honest, and influential because they are grounded in the realities of the world they seek to change.
If we refuse to tell stories, we leave the field to actors who may be less constrained by evidence and less concerned with truth. Yet if we embrace storytelling carelessly, we risk becoming part of the problem ourselves.
The task, therefore, is not to become entertainers, marketers, or propagandists. Nor is it simply to become better communicators, although many of us would undoubtedly benefit from that. The task is to become strategic actors without ceasing to be trustworthy institutions.
In an era of polarisation, fragmented publics, shrinking trust, and abundant artificial intelligence, that may be the most important contribution think tanks can make.
The future of our sector will depend not only on the quality of the evidence we produce, but on our ability to help societies make sense of increasingly contested realities. That requires stories. But it requires trustworthy stories.
Because if we do not tell them, others will.