I recently read Trust in Turbulence: The 2026 State of Organizational Trust, a research report from SparkEffect examining what happens to organizational trust when people and organizations experience disruption. It wasn’t written about Rotary, but it got me thinking about Rotary almost immediately. The report’s central premise is both simple and challenging: disruption is inevitable, but the way an organization responds to disruption can either erode trust or strengthen it. In fact, the research found that organizations experiencing disruption without meaningful intervention had significantly lower trust scores than those that had not experienced disruption. More interestingly, organizations that responded particularly well reported trust levels higher than those that had experienced no disruption at all.
That made me wonder whether we sometimes think about trust in Rotary too narrowly. We tend to think of trust as something personal. Do I trust my club president? Do I trust District leadership? Do I trust the person sitting across the table from me? But trust is also an organizational capability. It determines how well we can disagree, adapt, experiment, recover from mistakes and, ultimately, continue to serve our communities when circumstances change.
And Rotary is certainly experiencing change. Membership patterns are changing. Volunteer expectations are changing. Technology and artificial intelligence are changing how organizations operate. Financial pressures are changing the choices clubs and districts have to make. Leadership changes every year by design. Perhaps most importantly, the world around us is changing faster than many of the structures we created to serve it. That makes me think about one of Rotary’s simplest and most enduring leadership tools, the Four-Way Test: Is it the truth? Is it fair to all concerned? Will it build goodwill and better friendships? Will it be beneficial to all concerned? We usually think of these four questions as a test of personal conduct. Perhaps they are also a pretty good test of how we lead through disruption.
Is it the truth?
Trust doesn’t survive very long without honesty. In Rotary, this can be harder than it sounds because we are volunteers. We know people personally. We don’t want to offend someone who has given years of service. We don’t want to discourage a club that is struggling. We sometimes avoid difficult conversations because we think protecting relationships means protecting people from uncomfortable truths. I don’t think it does. If a club is struggling with membership, finances, participation or leadership, pretending otherwise doesn’t protect the club. It simply postpones the conversation. If a District initiative isn’t working, continuing to call it successful doesn’t make it successful. If something we’ve done for years no longer produces the impact we need, “but that’s how we’ve always done it” isn’t a strategy.
Truth doesn’t require being brutal. It requires being honest. The SparkEffect research found that when disruption goes unaddressed, trust suffers materially. The average Trust Score among people experiencing disruption without intervention was 68.3, compared with 82.4 among those who experienced no disruption. The lesson for Rotary is straightforward: silence isn’t neutral. Sometimes the most trust-building thing a leader can do is acknowledge what everyone already knows but nobody wants to say out loud.
Is it fair to all concerned?
This may be the question we should ask more often when making decisions in Rotary. Who benefits? Who carries the workload? Who bears the cost? Whose voice have we heard, and who haven’t we heard? Are we asking the same small group of people to keep doing more simply because we know they’ll say yes?
Rotary depends on people who are willing to step forward, but that doesn’t mean we should continually load the most willing people with more responsibilities, more committees, more meetings and more initiatives. The SparkEffect research reinforces the importance of fair treatment and transparency about uncertainty and tradeoffs when organizations are navigating disruption. That seems particularly relevant to a volunteer organization. We should be willing to make difficult decisions, but we should also be willing to explain them. People don’t necessarily have to agree with a decision to trust the process that produced it. That distinction matters.
Will it build goodwill and better friendships?
This is where Rotary has something many organizations don’t. Friendship is part of our mission. But friendship should never mean avoiding disagreement. Some of the best Rotary conversations I’ve had were with people who disagreed with me. The objective wasn’t to make everyone think alike. It was to create enough trust that we could disagree, listen, challenge one another and still walk out of the room as friends.
That is particularly important during periods of change. The SparkEffect research identifies direct managers as a critical point of leverage because they sit closest to the employee experience of disruption. When supported properly, they can be an extremely effective source of trust, but they can also become the point where organizational problems become personal. Rotary has its own version of this. Our club presidents, committee chairs, District leaders and other volunteers often sit directly between an organizational decision and the person who has to experience it. They translate, explain and absorb questions, and sometimes they absorb the frustration created by decisions they didn’t make.
We shouldn’t ask them to carry that burden alone. Good leadership means giving people the information, resources and authority they need to lead effectively. The SparkEffect report makes this point explicitly: the answer isn’t simply more training or more responsibility for managers. It is giving them the capacity and support to navigate the moments they are actually being asked to handle. That sounds a lot like good Rotary leadership to me.
Will it be beneficial to all concerned?
This may be the most important question because it forces us beyond the immediate issue. Rotary isn’t here to preserve Rotary. We exist to create positive change. That means we sometimes have to change ourselves. We need to be prepared to stop doing things that no longer work. We need to experiment with new approaches to membership and engagement. We need to use technology that can help us serve more effectively. We need to ask whether our time, money and energy are producing the impact we intended.
Sometimes those conversations will be uncomfortable, but avoiding discomfort isn’t the same thing as serving our members or our communities. The Four-Way Test doesn’t tell us what decision to make. It gives us a framework for how we make the decision. That distinction is important because good leadership isn’t about eliminating disagreement or making everyone happy. It is about creating enough trust that people can engage honestly with difficult questions while remaining committed to a common purpose.
Rotary Elasticity
The SparkEffect report uses the term “Trust Elasticity” to describe an organization’s ability to absorb disruption and recover from it. Their measure looks beyond trust itself to things such as team performance, meaningful roles, manager relationships, understanding of organizational direction and confidence in the organization’s ability to deal with future disruption. I found that concept particularly interesting because it describes something I have seen repeatedly in Rotary. Perhaps Rotary needs its own version, what we might call Rotary Elasticity.
Our ability to change without losing our values. To disagree without losing our friendships. To challenge traditions without disrespecting the people who built them. To embrace new ideas without abandoning the principles that brought us together. To recover from mistakes without spending our energy deciding who is to blame. And, perhaps most importantly, to recognize that the purpose of change isn’t change itself. It is greater impact.
The research found that organizations experiencing disruption without intervention had a Trust Elasticity score of 33.64. Those experiencing no disruption scored 39.75, but those experiencing high-quality intervention scored 42.85. In other words, disruption handled well can leave an organization stronger than it was before the disruption occurred. That is a powerful idea for Rotary. We shouldn’t aspire to avoid every disruption. We should aspire to become better at navigating it.
The real test
After nearly four decades of working in technology and organizational leadership, I’ve become increasingly convinced that the hardest part of change isn’t technology. It’s people. Technology can be replaced, processes can be redesigned and strategies can be rewritten. Trust is harder. Once lost, it takes time to rebuild.
That is why I keep coming back to the Four-Way Test. It is remarkably simple, but simple doesn’t mean easy. When we’re under pressure, when personalities get involved, when we’re defending something we’ve invested years building or when the future is uncertain, those four questions become much harder to answer honestly. And that’s precisely when we need them most.
Is it the truth? Have we been honest about what is happening, what we know and what we don’t? Is it fair to all concerned? Have we considered the impact on everyone, not just the people in the room? Will it build goodwill and better friendships? Can we disagree, challenge and change while maintaining the relationships that make Rotary work? Will it be beneficial to all concerned? Are we ultimately making Rotary better able to serve?
Trust isn’t built when everything is going well. It is forged in disruption. Every Rotary club and every Rotary District will face disruption. The question isn’t whether we can avoid it. The question is what kind of organization we choose to be when we come out the other side.
Perhaps the Four-Way Test gives us a pretty good answer.
