The Ability-Trust-Appeal Relationship Model
Every professional relationship rests on ability, trust, and appeal; the experience you are matters most
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 88%
LaPointe decomposes any professional relationship into three factors: ability (your utility/knowledge/skill), trust (the brain's read of risk, on three levels), and appeal (how your shared experiences feel). Counterintuitively, appeal matters most: a high-ability, trustworthy person who is a miserable experience gets sequestered out of the rooms where their value would count. The diagnostic question is 'what kind of experience am I?'
Origin
Evan LaPointe / CORE Sciences, grounded in amygdala-based risk processing and the social-mesh model of organizations.
Core principles
- 01Ability is integral to every professional relationship, which is why investing in your knowledge, reasoning, and imagination compounds
- 02Trust is the brain's assessment of risk and spans strongly negative (this person is dangerous) to strongly positive
- 03If the safety system activates around you, your utility is sunk: you become a protected, deactivated node the mesh routes around
- 04Appeal (are you a good experience) is biologically the biggest factor; a bad experience keeps you out of the rooms regardless of skill
How to run it
- 1
Assess ability/utility
Judge how much conceptual and practical value the person adds; high-ability people leave you 'better after you've talked to them every time.' Invest in your own ability because it underwrites every relationship.
Pro tip Ability includes knowledge, reasoning, imagination, and skill set; these are incremental facets you can grow deliberately.
- 2
Locate trust on three levels
Trust 1: delegate simple non-critical tasks ('bring the chips'). Trust 2: hand off work you'd normally do yourself with no added risk, unlocking team scalability. Trust 3: their mind is beyond yours on this topic, so 'just send me the bill.'
Pro tip Trust 2 ('is there anybody who could do this as well as me') is where true team scalability lives; Trust 3 is Spielberg letting John Williams score the film without questioning the horn count.
Watch out Strongly negative trust means the brain flags personal harm; that person is routed around no matter their skill.
- 3
Audit the experience you are
Ask 'am I a miserable experience?' before asking how good you are at the job. If appeal is the only thing undermining an otherwise skilled, trustworthy person, fix it first because everything else works better once it's fixed.
Pro tip Concrete appeal killers from the profile: low politeness, overbearing assertiveness, and hyper-low openness that tells everyone they're overcomplicating things.
Watch out A high-ability, trustworthy person who is 'a hurricane' gets left out of the offsite and the meeting; you don't want them there.
In the wild
LaPointe describes an awesome engineer who harms others: in the organizational mesh they become 'a node with a protective covering,' where information, delegation, and access stop flowing to them.
→ Their technical ability is neutralized because the safety system fired around them; they are sequestered and deactivated.
Common mistakes
Optimizing merit over experience
Believing the most skilled, trustworthy people should be in the room, then fighting to exclude them anyway when they're a terrible experience, is the biggest bug in translating merit to a business context.
Justifying a bad experience as honesty
Low-politeness people spend years calling harsh delivery 'efficient honest feedback' while it takes people six months instead of six minutes to act, because they don't like you.
Is it for you?
Best for
Individual contributors and leaders who feel skilled yet mysteriously excluded or slowed down
Not ideal for
Purely transactional one-off interactions with no ongoing relationship
From the transcript
“here's the plot twist your ability is actually not the most important part of a relationship biologically speaking”
“trust is simply risk human level RIS risk and Trust can span from strongly negative to strongly positive”
“the last piece of your of every relationship that you have is appeal appeal is how your brain interprets the shared experiences you have with…”
“it's critical to ask what kind of experience am I that is where to start not how good am I at my job”
“you are a kind of a protected deactivated sequestered node of the mesh”
From the episode
Improve strategy, influence, and decision-making by understanding your brain
Evan LaPointe (founder of CORE Sciences)