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EngagementEquity, Diversity & InclusionNon-profit sectorPolicy reviewPublic sectorStrategy

What Opens Up When Trust Is Present

Susan Underhill·2026-06-24

Part two: The craft of policy consulting

Most consulting projects produce a report. The best ones produce something the client can actually use.

The difference is rarely methodology. It is trust, and whether it was present throughout the project or not.

Trust determines what people are willing to share. It determines how honestly a client engages at the start, when context is everything. It determines whether a vulnerable participant tells you what the experience of navigating a system actually feels like, or gives you the version they think is safe. It determines whether a client stays close to the work at the end, when recommendations have to survive contact with political and organizational reality, or steps back and lets the report land on its own.

At every stage, trust changes what is possible.

At the start

The kick-off conversation with a client is not just about scope and timelines. It is where we establish what we are actually working with. We ask what has been tried before and what happened. We ask what the internal landscape looks like and what sensitivities we need to understand. When clients engage openly at that stage, the project starts with a complete picture rather than spending weeks assembling one.

That same openness matters in how we approach stakeholders, and it requires deliberate care when those stakeholders are from vulnerable populations. People who have experienced domestic violence, who are navigating disability systems, or who belong to communities that have been consulted and then ignored, do not extend trust automatically. It has to be earned.

We start by being explicit. Before anyone shares their story, we are clear about what will and will not leave the room, how their input will be used, who will see it, and in what form. Participation is a choice. Declining to answer anything is always an option. That clarity is not a formality. It is what makes honest participation possible.

Through the middle

When people trust the process, what they share is different. You hear the real story, not the official one. Staff describe where the system is actually breaking down. Clients tell you what navigating services genuinely feels like. Stakeholders say things they could not say in a more formal setting.

And because we have that, we can probe. We can ask the harder questions that get to root causes rather than surface symptoms. We can test our emerging analysis against what we are hearing and adjust before the thinking hardens.

We also go back. When findings are taking shape, we share what we heard with the people who told us and ask if we got it right. That validation step catches misrepresentation before it becomes a finding. It also signals that the process was genuine, that what people shared was taken seriously rather than just collected.

At the end

When the evidence is solid and the recommendations are written, there is still work to do. Evidence does not implement itself. Recommendations have to survive Ministry priorities, inter-departmental dynamics, and a political context that is shifting in real time.

In the strongest projects, the client brings us into the conversation about what leadership can hear right now, which relationships cannot absorb a particular framing, what language will allow the recommendation to move rather than stall. We hold the thread back to the evidence while the client works out how to act on it.

We push back when wording starts to drain a recommendation of its meaning. We also adapt, finding formulations that preserve the substance while giving the client something they can table and defend. That negotiation is only possible because the trust built over the project means both sides can be direct with each other.

That is what changes when trust is present. Not just a better process, but a different quality of output. Findings grounded in what people actually said. Recommendations the client understands deeply enough to navigate. Work that does not stop at the report.

What good looks like

A project built on trust looks different at every stage.

  • The client shares the real context at kick-off.
  • Participants know exactly what they are consenting to before they speak.
  • Findings go back to the people who contributed them.
  • And when the recommendations are written, the consultant is still in the room helping the client figure out how to move.

That is not a higher standard of consulting. It is just consulting that is worth paying for.

This is the second post in The Craft of Policy Consulting, a series on the judgment and dynamics that shape consulting work in the public and non-profit sectors.

Susan Underhill is the founder of Connor Claire Group, a policy and management consulting firm serving government and non-profit clients across Canada.