In Trust, We Thrive – Terence Mauri
The relentless twin demands of executing for today while reimagining for tomorrow, mean that leaders are grappling with an accelerated phase of business disruption and over $41 trillion of enterprise value at risk, but is enough being done to strengthen trust, which I define as the curiosity to learn and the courage to unlearn. Learning helps us evolve and unlearning helps us as the world evolves. The writer George Orwell best known for his novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four would have relished these times. Fake news, false facts, meme warfare, data breaches, tainted food and digital skulduggery. It’s not your imagination. More companies are operating at the edge of ethics and the commercial and human implications of truth decay are significant, with the impact on businesses alone estimated to cost organisations over $7 trillion globally in lost productivity. According to Hack Future Lab’s Truth Decay study, 10 out of 15 industry sectors have reported a collapse in trust over the last three years, and there are plenty of examples to explain why from the collapse of FTX, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges with a market cap of $32 billion to the culture of intimidation and secrecy at Theranos Inc., a biotech startup that was once valued at $10 billion.
Volatility on steroids
The Collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) marks the biggest US bank failure since Washington Mutual during the 2008 financial crisis. With multiplying and overlapping disruptions on the rise, how can business leaders rebuild years of eroded trust and resilience? According to Hack Future Lab, 67% of people do not believe today’s organisations are fit for purpose, and 1/3 of workers believe their job will not exist in a few years, due to AI, robotics and automation. The politics of deglobalisation and global labour supply problems favours ChatGPT, Bard AI and the strategy of ‘AI everywhere’ and mentions of AI in investor calls across 9,000 global companies have reached a new high. Now is the time to replace a ‘wait and see’ strategy with an ‘explore and disrupt’ one.
One of the clearest signs of trust is reframing and rethinking our assumptions about what stays, what changes, and what goes. This matters because the complexity of issues is outstripping our human capacity to respond — leading to a high leadership tax (less time to focus on value creation, productivity and growth) and record levels of overload, distraction and risk of burnout. Trust is a form of future readiness and an accelerant for turning volatility into a tailwind for strategic courage and trust.
Trust is your talent multiplier
Money is the currency of transactions and trust is the currency of humans. Trust-focused leaders champion the ‘spirit of trust’ principle by going big on context-setting, direction setting and sense-making, starting with asking deep human-centric questions that make workers think hard rather than feel good.
- Is trust our #1 value? If not, why not?
- Do we minimise or maximise trust and responsibility?
- Do we commodify or humanise trust?
- Do we obsess over trust, not just metrics?
- Do we make the invisible visceral?
- Do we enable wise trust-based choices, not just the fastest?
- Do we prioritise trust alongside growth and scale?
Trust-focused companies such as Patagonia, Lego Group and Apple enable workers to explore early-to-exploit know-how sooner and is the secret to a productive, flexible and happy workforce. It is defined by four DELTA’s (Distinct Elements of Trust and Agency) which are:
- Inclusion Trust: Do I bring my unique and authentic self to work?
- No Fail Trust: Can I take trust leaps into the unknown?
- Challenger Trust: Do I speak up (play to win) or stay silent (play to lose)?
- Team Trust: Are we better and wiser than the sum of our parts?
Leaders always overestimate the risk of trying something new and underestimate the risk of standing still and yet scaling creativity over conformity is a shortcut for being forward-looking and adaptable in nature: “Creativity is essential to resilience – it brings the new and unexpected ideas so necessary in times of disruption.” Says Tim Brown, Co-Chair, of IDEO.
No regret decisions
The regret of inaction outnumbers the regret of action by 3:1 and two of the biggest regrets are boldness and trust. Let’s not waste one of the biggest reframing moments of our lifetimes. As global growth stalls and organisations struggle to retain top talent, trust is key to building a sustainable and human-centric future. Leaders who want to harness the upside of disruption should reflect on whether their existing cultures, structures and leadership are built for trust. To change the game we need to make game-changing moves. Start by asking what ‘Future Success Headlines’ we want to be written about us and how will we make trust a central pillar for leading and thriving in an age of discontinuity.
Hack Future Lab founder, author and business thinker Terence Mauri challenges leaders to go big on trust as the ultimate human currency for leading and thriving in an age of discontinuity.
Terence Mauri has been described as ‘an influential and outspoken thinker on the future of leadership’ by Thinkers50. He is the founder of the global management think tank, Hack Future Lab, an Entrepreneur Mentor at MIT and an adjunct professor at IE Business School where he speaks about the future of leadership. His latest book The 3D Leader: Take your leadership to the next dimension is out now.