Trust is the Superpower for Man + Machine and Global Change

The acceleration of global integration has ushered in a new, interconnected world that defines our future.

Trust is the superpower that lays the foundation to emerge. To establish trust, leaders need to create a culture that values transparency, authenticity and the courage to fail.

We build trust through a pattern of selfless acts giving our time, attention and resources to others without the expectation of material return. Selfless acts, such as extending unexpected rewards or offering additional support during heightened times of stress, tighten our human bonds, strengthen our psychological safety and help make our sense of fear more manageable.

• Trust creates a sense of shared mission, unleashing meaningful purpose.
• Trust creates a feeling of security, unleashing resilience and collective cooperation.
• Trust facilitates healthy risk-taking and activates a growth mindset, unleashing imagination.
• Trust helps us connect as individuals, unleashing happiness and compassion.
• Trust opens the door to possibility, unleashing transformative practice.
• The speed of this innovation is accelerating and we will see even more change in the future than ever before.

The question, however, as we come to face rapidly changing realities, how do we solve for enhanced employee satisfaction, better customer experience and energetic execution of business strategy?

How do we weave long-term value creation into daily operations? Is the pace of global change sustainable?

The globalisation machine has brought great riches to those able to adapt, but left others further behind, leading to increasing inequality within countries. Another feature of globalisation is that it has bred interdependency, exposing the global population to cascading risks, from financial crises to pandemics and cyber-attacks. Our actions now affect others in ways that were unimaginable in a disconnected world.

Notwithstanding, humans don’t just have the ability to adapt. They have the power to assess, process, and grow. Flourishing in the face of change requires mutual trust, a mindset open to possibility and ongoing practice both on the individual and corporate levels.

We now live in a world where virtually anyone can bring about mass destruction. Cyber has become the new nervous system and will become ever more vulnerable as the internet-of-things technology sees explosive growth. New technologies also threaten the very fabric of our society. An Oxford University research group says 47 percent of US jobs are vulnerable to machine intelligence and perhaps as much as 35 percent of UK jobs.

A seismic shift is underway. Thanks to new technologies that enable frequent, low-friction, customized digital interactions, companies today are building much deeper ties with customers than ever before. Instead of waiting for customers to come to them, firms are addressing customers’ needs the moment they arise—and sometimes even earlier. It’s a win-win: Through what we call connected strategies, customers get a dramatically improved experience, and companies boost operational efficiencies and lower costs.

Research has identified four effective connected strategies, each of which moves beyond traditional modes of customer interaction and represents a fundamentally new business model. These strategies have been described as; a response to desire, curated offering, coach behaviour, and automatic execution. What’s innovative here is not the technologies these strategies incorporate but the ways that companies deploy those technologies to develop continuous relationships with customers.

Most companies still interact with customers only episodically, after customers identify their needs and seek out products or services to meet them. You might call this model buy what we have.

In it, companies work hard to provide high-quality offerings at a competitive price and base their marketing and operations on the assumption that they’ll engage only fleetingly with their customers.

Let’s explore specifically the aforementioned strategies:

Respond to Desire; this strategy involves providing customers with services and products they’ve requested—and doing so as quickly and seamlessly as possible. The essential capabilities here are operational: fast delivery, minimal friction, flexibility, and precise execution.

Curated Offering; with this strategy, companies get actively involved in helping customers at an earlier stage of the customer journey: after the customers have figured out what they need but before they’ve decided how to fill that need. Executed properly, a curated-offering strategy not only delights customers but also generates efficiency benefits for companies, by steering customers toward products and services that firms can easily provide at the time. The key capability here is a personalized recommendation process. Customers who value advice—but still want to make the final decision like this approach.

Coach Behaviour; both of the previous two strategies require customers to identify their needs in a timely manner, which (being human) we’re not always good at. Coach-behaviour strategies help with this challenge, by proactively reminding customers of their needs and encouraging them to take steps to achieve their goals. Coaching behaviour works best with customers who know they need nudging. Some people want to get in shape but can’t stick to a workout regimen.

Automatic Execution; all the strategies we’ve discussed so far require customer involvement. But this last strategy allows companies to meet the needs of customers even before they’ve become aware of those needs. In an automatic-execution strategy, customers authorize a company to take care of something, and from that point on the company handles everything. The essential elements here are strong trust, a rich flow of information from the customers, and the ability to use it to flawlessly anticipate what they want. The customers most open to automatic execution are comfortable having data stream constantly from their devices to companies they buy from and have faith that those companies will use their data to fulfill their needs at a reasonable price and without compromising their privacy.

There is a revealing quote often associated with management theorist and proponent of systems thinking W. Edwards Deming: “In God we trust; others must provide data”. Deming died nearly thirty years ago, but the business world has embraced his philosophy ever more tightly since then. Today we are surrounded by astonishing amounts of data, and our ability to parse, analyze, and interpret them would likely be beyond even his far-seeing mind.

With the coming of Big Data—and the opportunity it gives for providing nuanced, ever-more personalized analysis, interpretations, and solutions to problems—it can at times seem that all future decisions will only be taken inside the ‘black box’ of the processing unit, hidden from human view and comprehension.

Increasingly we are seeing why this is not best practice. For me, all analytics should start with the human—not, as is often the case, with the data.

Twenty-five quintillion bytes of data are generated every day. That’s 25,000,000,000,000,000,000.

In this era of data abundance, it’s easy to think of these bytes as a panacea – informing policies and spurring activities to address the pandemic, climate change or gender inequality – but without the right systems in place, we cannot realize the full potential of data to advance a sustainable, equitable and inclusive future.

As our global challenges grow increasingly urgent, it is clear we need to approach data in a new way.

Business analytics should offer a structured, systematic way for leaders and teams to approach business problems. There should be systems that allow us to leverage the underlying data to support the intuition of individuals, and certainly not replace the decision-making capabilities and experience of domain experts who should be guiding the process.

It is not only organizations that need to have expertise in evaluating and analysing data. Data-driven decisions are now so prolific that we all, as individuals, have an interest in better understanding how these processes and systems operate.

There is a common misconception that recruiting an expert in data analytics or data science is going to lead to quick solutions to every problem you have. Very often the new talent with data expertise does not have the domain expertise required to fully engage with and understand these problems to begin with. Not, at any rate, at as broad and deep a level as you would need in order for them to bring about optimal and innovative solutions.

To unlock the real value of these new data analytics hires, they should be partnered with your domain experts—people with a very sharp intuition about the right questions to ask and the issues your team or organization ought really to be caring about.

In order for technology to reach its full potential, company leaders need to be transparent and instill trust for data sharing. Research by the British Science Association revealed a vast lack of trust in artificial intelligent machines, with fears of being ‘taken over’ by technology. This suspicion is a major barrier to close relationships forming between technology and humans a relationship that is needed in order for technology to work. As an example, artificial intelligence is in fact not artificial at all, it is an astute web of intelligence surfacing the most pertinent elements at the right time for the right purpose and enabling humans to make the choices that are right for them.

While some may think artificial intelligence is a long way from affecting their day to day, companies must get a handle on how best to utilise its superpowers before it’s too late. Action is the true measure of technology either taking action on our behalf because we have chosen them to do so, or informing action that we take. We’re on the cusp of a generational change in how we think about computing. While the capabilities of machines and the capabilities of humans are different, they work so much better together. The power and accuracy of AI complements the creativity and emotion of humans. Together they are more powerful than either is alone.

Final thought, with trust as the end goal, it’s crucial that the design of new technologies be fully consistent with an organization’s and community’s values. The challenge for organizations is to anticipate unexpected implications of the tools and innovations that they build and avoid reinforcing existing social inequalities, as well as consider the ethics of the elimination of existing jobs on the future workforce.

A great quote by Paul R. Daugherty, “Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI”, sums up the final thought perfectly:

“The simple truth is that companies can achieve the largest boosts in performance when humans and machines work together as allies, not adversaries, in order to take advantage of each other’s complementary strengths.”