On trust, stakeholders, and what engineering school doesn’t teach you

Imagine a stranger coming and knocking on your door asking about the electrical devices you have inside. Would you answer?

I know I wouldn’t.

And yet, countless engineers and designers go around the world, entering communities they don’t know, making all sorts of assumptions, gathering information, and generalizing it into solutions, hoping to build water systems, electrical infrastructure, or basic technology for people they’ve never truly listened to, all in the name of “helping.”

As a grad student in electrical engineering, who had the privilege of working outside of electrical labs and simulators, what I learned was that trust-building, is far more important than any circuit theory or optimization model I have studied. It takes time and patience to build trust, and one wrong move to have it shattered. Trust is not a soft skill you figure out after the “real” stuff. It is the foundation of good design.

Every project in the real world has multiple stakeholders.

The technicians and maintenance group who will repair the system
The political system whose approval of your design is a must
The user community who will live with your perfectly designed system every
single day
The funding agency or NGO evaluating the financial viability of your design
And finally, yours truly, the engineer

And here’s what I’ve learned from personal experience working on off-grid systems in Navajo Nation: people will not share what you need to know unless they trust you.

As an engineer who has worked with off-grid systems on the Navajo Nation, I can tell you that community members won’t always share the full picture. They might not mention that the system doesn’t generate enough power on cloudy days to run basic appliances. They won’t easily open up about the drawbacks of the system. They won’t tell you the repair team barely answers their calls when the system goes down. And when you first show up focused on electrical infrastructure, they might not bring up a far more fundamental issue in their daily lives, like livestock water. Not unless they trust you.

This kind of information does not appear in datasets, formal interviews, or internet searches. It gets shared with you only when people feel safe enough to tell you the reality, and not just what they think you want to hear. They need to know you are there to listen, not to dictate your terms.

Without community trust, your design is the result of your assumptions. With it, your collaborative design becomes an optimized solution. The design that is for a specific context and therefore, it has a much higher chance of surviving and evolving within its real implementation circumstances.

So how do you build trust? There’s no algorithm, and you won’t find it in any textbook. What you need is patience and time. Start by asking before assuming, and when you have a prototype, bring it back to the community and confirm it with them, incorporate what they know into what you’ve built. Explain the why of every decision, not just the what, because people deserve to understand the reasoning behind something that will affect their lives. When you make mistakes, and you will, admit them openly and be genuinely receptive to their ideas. Don’t promise what you can’t deliver. And when the project is ’done,’ go back anyway, check whether it actually works, and treat everything the community has shared with you as real, valid, and necessary knowledge. This is what Contextual Engineering looks like in practice: a continuous loop of listening, learning, and adapting to the reality of the people who are your partners in designing that piece of technology.

Trust is not a step-by-step algorithm. It’s an investment of time and a lot of listening. And it might be the most important thing we ever build.

Further reading

To read more about trust building between stakeholders: https://doi.org/10.1109/IHTC65087.2025.11216303

To read more about solar electricity in Navajo Nation: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2023.103342

To read more about contextual engineering: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-07692-3