The Trust Zone System helps us to work out when we can relax and accept people at face value (Green Zone), when we need to be cautious (Amber Zone) and when we need to be on alert (Red Zone). We establish who is in each zone based on the behaviours a person shows over a reasonable amount of time.

TLDR – Trust Zones uses the trend of a person’s behaviours to work out if they are Reliably Good or Reliably Problematic. This makes it much less costly to know whom to trust.

This incorporates into the Traffic Light System, where:

Green = Good,
Amber = Caution, and
Red = Concern.

Quick Contents

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Quick Traffic Light System Review

To maximise cooperation, a functional society prioritises enculturing forgiveness, second chances, assuming that bad behaviours are just a mistake and defining kindness in terms of keeping people in the group, looking after our weak and injured, and letting people grow. Keeping people happy runs the risk of People Pleasing and Conflict Avoidance which we cover in Rejection Sensitivity.

The Traffic Light System uses the standard traffic light colours to help guide our evaluation and management of people.

Green is what we are looking for. Green is trust, cooperative behaviour, social building trends.
Amber is unknown, uncertain, be alert but not alarmed.
Red is caution, problematic, abusive behaviours and trends.

Flag System

The Flag System assesses and individual behaviour a person may display. Their actions speak the loudest – so what are they doing? Does their action warrant a Green (preferred), Amber (caution) or Red (harmful) flag?

Trust Zones

Trust Zones describes how we can place a person’s trending behaviours in one of 3 zones, Green (Presumption of Good), Amber (uncertain, unknown), or Red (Presumption of Harm), which simplifies how we interact with people on a day to day basis.

Good to Abusive Scale

The Good to Abusive Scale is the process we use to evaluate a person’s response to inevitable mistakes and guides us to work out whether we should give them the presumption of good (Green Trust Zone), or the presumption of abusive (Red Trust Zone).

The Three Pillars Method

The Three Pillars Method is used to help guide how many chances we give people to improve, and how to gauge that they are learning (Green), poorly learning (Amber) or abusive / failing to learn (Red). We don’t need to give everyone a second chance.

Brief: The Point of This

Trust Zones are a way to simplify how to treat each individual person. If their trend of behaviours (via the Flag System) is Green, they go in the Green Trust Zone, where you can assume they are reliable and their actions are viewed with the Assumption of Good (via Good to Abusive Scale ). If the trend of their behaviour is bad, they gon in the Red Trust Zone, where we assume they are unreliable, transactional and their actions are viewed with the Assumption of Harm.

Trust Zones

Green Zone: Assumption of Good
- For predominantly Green Flag Behaviours, reliable, trustworthy.
- Cheap in social spoons as we don’t have to be very alert to deception and harm.
Amber Zone:
- For new people who haven’t yet earned trust,
- For Green Zone people who are acting a bit odd and unpredictable on a history of Green Flag Behaviour.
Red Zone: Assumption of Harm
- For people who show a trend of Red Flag harmful behaviours, and not growing from it,
- For someone who has done a very harmful action.

Trust is Earned – A reliable trend of good

The saying “actions speak louder than words” is very apt for looking at someone’s behaviour. A person can promise you the world, but promises are empty until they are acted upon. Abusive people will often give empty promises – they’ll promise the earth and will rarely follow through. Common promises such as they’ll learn better, change their behaviours, be there for you and so on.

Decent people will do as they say, and are reliable. Abusive People won’t do reliably do what they say, and aren’t reliable.

“Words are cheap. Actions are where it is at.

The true worth of a person is in the actions they take to improve the situation.”

Joshua Davidson, BSW

Cycle of Violence: Pursuit Phase

Hollow Words:
- Words that mean something to you. If they meant something to them, they’d do something about their violence.
Empty Gestures:
- Gifts and services to distract you from what they’ve done, rather than something to decrease a repeat of their behaviour.
False Promises:
- Promises of change or actions for change, yet they never seem to happen or fix the problem.
Crocodile Tears:
- Emotive words and acting that triggers your nurturer. They seem genuine, but never mean enough to them that they’ll change.

When we look at a single behaviour, we use the Flag System.

Behaviour Flag Colour

Green Flag – Good behaviour,
Amber Flag – Confusing, ambiguous, or
Red Flag – Harm was done, no improvement seems to be happening

Because anyone can make a mistake, or be involved in an unfortunate incident despite their best efforts, unless the Red Flag behaviour is egregious, we do not immediately assume a person who has shown many Green Flags to be an Abusive Person. We give a person a chance to learn from their mistakes and do better. We have a process for how to do this, described well in the Good to Abusive Scale, and will cover the highlights in the Trust Zones themselves.

While intentions are good, we can’t truly know them. We can hear their stated intentions, but people can lie. Actions are more reliable, and the actions to outcomes more important than that.

We predict what people are likely to do based on their history of what they have done – on their history of actions and behaviours.

Constantly figuring out the Flag value for every behaviour people do around us is fatiguing and will make us more frightened and vulnerable. Trust Zones used in conjunction with the rest of the Traffic Light System simplifies this process of assessment, and helps us see who is safe and who is not.

We form Trust around a Trend of Behaviours.

Good people will generally do good things, Abusive people will generally do bad things.

If only it were as simple as objectively looking at what people do. Kind of it is, but we need to also acknowledge that Abusers are good at confusing, lying, taking advantage of our fatigue and hijacking our forgiveness.

Spoon Theory is the general idea that we all have a finite amount of resources that we can spend throughout the day to get through the day. Some of us have a smaller number of Spoons to get things done and some processes are more expensive for us than for most people. Social Spoons are the internal resources that we expend to manage interacting with people.

The Three Trust Zones allow us to figure out whether we can relax and let our guard down / be less guarded (Green Zone) which is very cheap and efficient for our Social Spoons; be more attentive but not yet alarmed or concerned (Amber Zone), which is more expensive; or whether we need to proceed with extreme caution and put in protective strategies and boundaries (Red Zone) – the most expensive. This helps us to conserve Cognitive and Social Spoons when interacting with identified trusted people (Green Zone), or to increase alertness around uncertain people (Amber Zone) a bit more expensive); and be danger wise when interacting with known perpetrators (very expensive).

Green Zone – Assumption of Good

Green Zone: You’ve earned my trust based on consistent positive Green Flag behaviours. You have earned the Presumption of Good.

People who mostly trend Green Flags have earned a place in the Green Zone of trust. Some of the people who show these behaviours might be good friends, or even intimate partners. Green Zone People do not have to be friends, they may just be people who have proven themselves to be trusted acquaintances, work associates that you can rely on, or family members who are allies.

The point is, people who have earned Green Zone status have matched enough Green Flag behaviours to their words of intent that they can, by default, be trusted, because they have earned the Assumption of Good.

Knowing this means that you can decrease your level of alertness to harm and preparation for failure around them.

Knowing who is a Green Zone person allows you to make reasonably accurate assumptions about their likely behaviours rather than having to treat every encounter as an unknown, where you would need to be prepared for anything (expensive in Spoons).

Green Zone people are predictable and reliable

They do what they say, or make it clear that something has occurred that has prevented them from doing so in enough time that you can generally make adjustments.
They learn and grow from mistakes, and try to make amends for errors.
They try not to promise or agree to things they likely can’t do.

That is, you can relax.

You don’t 100% trust a Green Zone person to never mess up. Green Zone people are People, and all people make mistakes. It is also possible that some Green Zone people may become unreliable for all sorts of reasons, which may be short term (Amber Zone) or long term (may become Red Zone). We don’t want to blind ourselves to the possibility of this.

Using a combination of Good to Abusive Scale and Three Pillars Method, you can work through if a Green Zone person has had a learning opportunity, or has lost the Assumption of Good.

Amber Zone – Caution

People in Amber Zone either haven’t yet given you enough examples of their behaviours to trust that this is truly their trend (New People), or previously trustworthy people who are acting unexpectedly oddly (Ambiguous Green Zoners). Amber Zone people need more attention than Green Zone people, focusing on the comparison of what they are saying versus what they are doing, with priority for assessment on the consequences of what their actions are creating and whether or not the person is making positive changes (learning and growing).

New People – Being reasonably cautious

Most people are good, most of the time, in most circumstances. When we meet a new person, unless we have clear indications otherwise, it is most useful to assume the person is likely to be one of these good people.

However, we don’t know they are good yet. We begin by presuming good intentions and give them some safe opportunities to show that we can trust them. Ideally, we aim to default to the first three parts of the Good to Abusive Scale for new people.

Good to Abusive Scale snippet

Assumption of Good:
- Most people are mostly good most of the time
Principle of Charity:
- We apply the Principle of Charity, where we view peoples intent in the best reasonable interpretations, but allow them to explain their intent, actions and where they think things went wrong.
Hanlon’s Razor:
- “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity [ignorance/inability]”.
- Malice is rare, so the odds are the problem was ignorance or a mistake.

While we need to give the new person some opportunities to show us they can be trusted, this should be on a sliding scale of minimal bad consequences to yourself or others if the person shows themself to consistently not be trustworthy, and increase the level of trust bit by bit until you feel they have earned the Green Zone.

A guide to Earning Green Zone: You begin to assume that they’ll do as they say.

If the person shows themself to not be worthy of trust, and or their actions do not match a person who is Mostly Good Most of the Time, then they can either stay in the “I don’t know you well, or have much trust in you” side of the Amber Zone, or if they have done some suitably questionable actions, hurt you, or hurt someone you care about (with enough evidence to be confident with) then the person can be shifted to the Red Zone.

Green Zone Ambiguity

Amber Zone: I’m watching what you do, comparing that to what you say, and seeing if you learn. I take the ‘rose tinted glasses’ off and have a Cold Hard Look at what you are doing, to see the flags without the Assumption of Good / Principle of Charity.

Sometimes people are going through a hard time and they become unreliable, or sometimes we have been far too forgiving of someone because we thought they were a Green Zone person. When we have noticed that a person’s current actions are at odds with how we would expect a trusted Green Zone person to act, then it is wise to temporarily put them in the Amber Zone, to remind us to be cautious for a while.

If the reason why a person has been reclassified to the Amber Zone is a temporary life issue, or a certain catastrophe of misunderstanding between the two of you (or someone else you trust), then this should be short term and the person can go back to being in the Green Zone when things are settled (Pillar 2 of the Three Pillar Method).

On the other hand, if we do find out we misjudged them for the Green Zone, the section above about a person not being worthy of trust applies: they can either stay in Amber Zone of uncertain trust but also not being harmful, OR they can be demoted to the Red Zone if there are signs of harmful behaviours.

It is also possible that the person’s life has led them to be different, and no longer a good candidate for the Green Zone.

Red Zone – Assumption of Harm

People who have shown a trend of Red Flag behaviours without growth can be relied on to continue that trend, a high likelihood of Red Flag behaviours. Your prediction of their next actions should include an Assumption of Harm. Not because you are being mean, but because you are reasonably predicting their next actions based on the pattern they have shown you.

People who trend Red Flag behaviour and don’t change are either:

Incapable: Cannot understand the effect of their actions,
Indifferent: They don’t care about the consequences of their actions, or
Malicious: The harmful outcome is actually what they want.

It doesn’t matter which of these is true, the predictable outcome of their next action will be ‘likely harmful’. Not not make this prediction and be cautious is foolish and unreasonable.

‘Harm’ is more than Physical

Physical,
Threats,
Coercion,
Financial,
Emotional,

Identity,
Spiritual,
Isolating,
or more (see Domestic Violence Primer)

It is important to recognise when someone is doing harmful things, that you cannot trust them to be fair or rational, and thus place them in the Red Zone.

While there can be a range of reasons why they might be doing those harmful things, and it doesn’t matter what those excuses are. When you make a plan and they are involved, your history with them shows that they are not likely to do the kinds of actions that help. Instead, their actions are costly, disruptive and or harmful.

Put another way, when you make a plan with a Green Zone person, you might make a backup plan in the unlikely circumstance something goes wrong. When you make a plan with a Red Zone person, you’d be a fool to not make several management plans for when things will likely do go wrong.

The best course of actions for Red Zone people is to avoid them.

Managing Red Zone People

We can’t always avoid Red Zone People. Sometimes they are in our social circles despite our efforts to get them out or get away from them. This could be a family member, a work colleague, or a friend of a friend of ours.

Friends of Red can’t be Green

When a friend continues to interact with a Red Zone person, even if that friend would normally be a Green Zone person, be cautious classifying them as Green Zone. A friend is different to an acquaintance, so in this case, we will interpret a friend as someone who often includes the Red Zone person in their plans, or spends significant time with the Red Zone person. This means the Red Zone person influences the normally Green Zone friend enough to decrease their trustworthiness.

Enough Spoons to be Alert

When you interact with a Red Zone person, it is important to ensure you have enough spoons to be alert and able to metaphorically fence with them. If you do not have sufficient spoons, cancel the interaction.

Staying on alert and being able to avoid potential conflicts is exhausting. Try to keep the interaction to a limited amount of time, often 2 hours or less. Have a reason to leave if you need to.

You can sometimes dilute the intensity of the Red Zone person with more people, but some Red Zone people will manipulate a crowd and that is even more expensive.

Avoid Committing on the Spot

Red Zone people try to push you to make a commitment for or against a thing and will try to impart emotional reasons or urgent reasons for you to do so. The best tactic to manage this is delay the decision until you have had a bit of time to think about what you really want to do.

This is sometimes not possible and a decision needs to be made. The default you should go for in this is “No, but I might change my mind.”

Avoid Relying on Them

Red Zone people are poorly reliable, or they are reliably poor help. This is what got them into the Red Zone.

Where possible, have a back up plan for what you needed them to do. Where possible, create limits to how long you will wait, what you will spend in time or money, or when you can comfortably cancel.

Mostly, though, avoid making plans that rely on them.