In Islam there is a hadith urging you to ‘trust in God but also tie up your camel’…
Who can you truly trust?
Full disclosure, I am a Scorpio – we are famously obsessed with trust. And rightly so!
Trust must be the oldest currency us humans traded in. It would literally have been a matter of life and death back in the day. Trust that someone would bring back, and then share, their berries, trust that they would mention if there was a large animal lurking behind you licking its lips.
And trust in business behaviour has sure been tested over time – oil spills in the ocean, forced labour in sweat shops, contamination of public water supply, over-prescription of addictive drug OxyContin. Depressingly, I could go on. But businesses have increasingly recognised the need for greater transparency to increase trust – particularly where it relates to issues such as environmental impact and action, tax and ownership structures and good governance.
The Edelman Trust Barometer has tracked the influence of trust across society for over 20 years and the 2024 results highlight how little we trust established leaders to tell us the truth. When asked if leaders ‘are purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations’ respondents believe this to be true of 64% journalists and reporters, 63% Government leaders, and 61% business leaders.
There is clearly a crisis in trust when it comes to leaders in all areas of our society.
Post Truth
In 2016 ‘post truth’ was the Oxford Dictionary word of the year and although fake news was a commonly referenced bedfellow that year – that phrase was first used in the 1890s. I was a sceptic at first – I really wasn’t sure why we needed new words to define what was essentially good old fashioned lies and BS. But I stand corrected.
Your trust is first seriously tested when you discover the story behind visits from the Tooth Fairy and Father Christmas. Youngsters are resilient and recover fast from discovering the jaw dropping truth – in fact I think many among their number become complicit in perpetuating the lie on discovering it, for fear their address may be removed from the list!
And then as you grow up you can’t trust what you see on social media because there are filters galore and nobody posts their fears, failures or weaknesses.
And you can’t trust algorithms (or the firms that thrust them upon you) not to perpetuate deep divisions in society, they are the equivalent of shooting confirmation bias directly into your veins.
Eroded reality
Millions watched the excellent BBC drama The Capture – by no means the first dystopian depiction of the future of tech but perhaps so chilling because as we watched from the comfort of our living rooms we had a creeping suspicion that the future was already here.
Season one called into question the validity of CCTV footage in a murder case and in the second season in 2022 a deepfake wreaks political havoc. Despite its brilliance, perhaps even because of it – we yearned for the show to feel more far-fetched.
But by 2023 we had learnt that with only 3 seconds audio of your voice, cybercriminals could use AI voice cloning tools to impersonate you and breach your security. And then in early 2024 even the White House was ‘alarmed’ by the Taylor Swift deepfake pornographic images that flooded the internet – AI porn generated by nefarious characters and fuelled by rampant misogyny.
And now with the Google Pixel 8 on sale featuring Magic Eraser and AI driven Magic Editor, photographs can simply no longer be believed. My friend sat beside me and took a photo of us both then erased me from the image. I was still sat there but how would I ever be able to prove it? Ah maybe because I could ‘rest assured’ that both my Apple iPhone and Alexa were listening to me at the time so might be able to verify my whereabouts if necessary. Now imagine that phone at the scene of a crime.
In all the excitement that in the future our reality will be augmented, we need to recognise that it could perhaps even more easily be eroded too.
Trust is earned when actions meet words
Trust will be the defining issue in the future we are facing. Trust is based on reliability, ability and truth and everyone knows it is hard to earn, fragile to maintain and impossible to regain once broken.
Businesses often refer to the importance of trust and transparency but we are entering a new era where being trusted as a brand will I think be the most essential competitive advantage of all.
When nothing is certain and little is real, who you trust – which individuals, institutions, leaders, brands or businesses – will become the most fundamental consideration of all. So ask yourself, ‘who can you truly trust?’