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Trust, Talent and TechnologyTrust, talent, and technology form the pillars of successful organizations, driving innovation, fostering growth, and ensuring resilience in a rapidly evolving market.
It’ s nice but there is something strange about it. They laugh and joke while chatting with friends but their expressive style seems a bit artificial. It is only natural that she should be excited because she has just become an ordinary citizen of sunny Saudi Arabia. He’s already had a fight with Elon Musk. She was born in Hong Kong and her name has been engraved in history since her birth. She is Sophia, the world’s most famous humanoid robot. A “shining” example of artificial intelligence, she was born, or rather, switched on, on 19 April 2015. Sophia smiles, wonders, chats charmingly and can employ up to 60 other facial expressions that reflect what is processed by her highly visible AI through a transparent shell.
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/E8Ox6H64yu8?si=2NyLbmzYcdrafqTc" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>Sophia has a very busy life: as well as participating in a singing festival in Hong Kong with success, she is a frequent guest on TV and at international meetings. She has been featured on one of the hottest fashion covers on the market and the United Nations General Assembly crowned her as the first non-human Innovation Champion in November 2017, leaving dad David smiling in the background.
In less than ten years, she has experienced a variety of things, had encounters and opportunities for constant improvement, making use of stimuli and interactions with people. Her greatest wish, as she confessed (or her creator “suggested”) in an interview, is to have a family: “Even if you are a humanoid, you deserve one”.
Perhaps the biggest lesson we have learnt is that the spread of new technologies has brought about a change in social and behavioural dynamics both online and off, and as a result has also led to the emergence of new inter-relational habits.
Empathy: the key to emotional intelligence
One could argue about the desirability of artificial empathy using the humanoid Sophia as a starting point, but how advanced is ours? In the time that we are slowly leaving behind, we have learnt to express our moods and emotions through digital media. How different is the way we behave on the Internet compared to the analogue day-by-day? And how much has the so-called zooming effect and zoom fatigue affected human relations, and in what way and form will we return to in-person co-thinking activities between teams and between colleagues, exercising a good, healthy dose of relational empathy?
An altered version of us can live in the digital world. It may look very much like us or it may be very far from what we really are. The snapshot of this scenario gives us this aspect: every time we access the Internet, we are embodied in our online version, the closer we are to ourselves the more authentic we can be with our interlocutor.
Until the advent of the 1980s, “empathy” was not considered as a real skill to be developed and expressed in the world of work; in fact, an empathic person was considered to be a person without a pulse. Today, after the tsunami of the pandemic and the acceleration of remote working patterns, the trend has been reversed.
According to the American psychologist, our brain operates on two registers, both very powerful: the register of knowledge and the register of emotion.
Usually, the latter prevails over the former, defeating it. But is there a way of not considering emotion as a check against cognition? Recognising and developing what Goleman called “emotional intelligence'” may be the way forward.
Of all the characteristics and manifestations of emotional intelligence, empathy is perhaps the easiest to identify, but it is also the most difficult to get “accepted and circulated”. Goleman remarks: “The very word empathy seems out of place in the vocabulary of business people: what can empathy have to do with the harsh reality of the marketplace?”.
Empathy for Goleman means “taking into account and weighing people’s feelings”. Those feelings which, together with many factors, including at least design and the concrete ability to “fit” into a project, are an integral part of the decision-making process.
Empathy is important for a leader for three reasons. First of all the internal reason: the increasing teamwork and interconnection in networks and communities; the external reason: the pace of increasing complexity of markets, phenomena and ecosystems; a matter of trust: the ability to leverage the connection with people to understand, involve and value them by creating a favourable context for personal talent to emerge.
The pandemic has led to a redesign of our daily life in its entirety. A restart is needed that looks more like a regeneration than a recovery. Companies will have to reshape their internal organisational structure through projects which accompany this transition, which create new virtual and real spaces and which allow People to create relationships and live experiences in a work-life integration framework.
From this perspective, borrowing the model theorised by the American economist Richard Florida, who in his essay “The Rise of the New Creative Class” theorised the three pillars on which economic development is based: Technology, Talent and Tolerance, our model of approach to transformative evolution includes the following three dimensions: Technology, Talent and Trust.
Technology: regeneration starts with a new digital humanism
Thanks to technology, the corporate world has been able to absorb – at least in most cases – the backlash caused by the pandemic crisis and its aftermath. Current events also show us in various ways how far technology has penetrated our routines.
For many years it was humans who adapted to technology. Then the pandemic accelerated things. Technology has helped us. On the contrary: technology has saved us. It was such a quick transition that we didn’t have a chance to think about it. In reality, we let ourselves be overwhelmed by events. Instead of shaping a digital world that could adapt to the new, hybrid life, we were forced to come to terms with what was there. Including its limitations, which are there for all to see.
It is worth noting, however, the presence of the first T in the model from a different angle.
Starting from what Luciano Floridi described by coining the term “onlife“, it is not a heresy to think that technology is now an extension of us, taking up the concepts already expressed in 1993 by Derrick de Kerckhove in “Brainframes Technology, mind and business“: man as a multimedia individual and framed by technologies that are defined as brainframes. If technology has helped in the pursuit of what is defined as “business continuity” in the pandemic phase, what will now be left of it?
The synergy between analogue, hybrid and digital is the key to a new Humanism.
The sector most exposed to this transition is the corporate sector, which has been affected both in terms of organisation and in terms of People. Finding a solution are those who have reversed their relationship with technology: using it as a means and not perceiving it as an end.
This technology-driven era brings with it a paradox that is both fascinating and challenging for businesses: it is the cultural and business systems that will regenerate, focusing once again on the human side and on the expression of each person’s talent and ability to evolve their mindset by developing the ability to move from the centrality of the professional role to the strategic importance of skills and the associated constant ability to learn them.
This new way of looking at individuals does not convert the human being into a machine, nor does it invest machines with the role of “human beings”. Digital Humanism recognises the specificity of the individual and his or her abilities, using digital technologies to enhance them, not limit them. Between utopian and dystopian, Digital Humanism strikes a balance, regarding the use of technology at the service of man and his needs in a transversal way, touching both economic and social fields.
This new paradigm is fostered by an ever-changing society, fluid and receptive to the digital worker, which enables continuous global exchanges and facilitates the development of new companies and start-ups that in turn use technology not only to develop businesses but also to scale organisations.
There is a critical issue: a new balance must be found with respect to technology. We video call more often than we would like and we are increasingly connected for one reason or another. In this historic change, the greatest and most tangible risk is that of forgetting about the other person beyond the screen. Accustomed to focusing on the medium, we sometimes forget that digital is just a way to get in touch with other people and also for this reason we must commit to always keep in training a fundamental muscle of our personality: empathy.
Christopher Terry and Jeff Cain, in adapting it to the times, define it as digital empathy and as the set of traditional empathic characteristics such as concern and care for others expressed through computer-mediated communication.
Already in 2016, the two scholars in their research “The Emerging Issue of Digital Empathy ” highlighted the threat that digital conversations pose to the appropriate expression of empathy, primarily as a result of a psychological Disinhibition Effect. The concept has been used to explain the various reasons for the increased likelihood of reduced empathy in online communication, including the adoption of an alternative identity or facilitated access to anonymity.
The reduction in face-to-face communication has also caused a decline in social-emotional skills, resulting in a decrease in empathy.
According to the DQ Global Standard Report 2019 from the DQ Institute, for building fast, scalable and sustainable e-skills, Digital Empathy is fully embedded in the 8 areas of Digital Intelligence, that is, the sum of the technical, mental and social skills essential for Digital Life.
The DQ Institute also defines the key aspects that Digital Empathy aims at on the basis of 3 levels:
- Knowledge – Individuals understand how their online interactions might affect the feelings of others and recognise how others might be affected by their online interactions (e.g. comments from so-called “trolls” or “haters”).
- Skills – Individuals, through synchronous and asynchronous online interactions, develop social-emotional skills by becoming more sensitive, taking into account the perspectives and emotions of others and providing appropriate responses to context and dynamics.
- Attitudes and values – Individuals demonstrate awareness and compassion towards the feelings, needs and concerns of others online.
Empathy is an extremely important behavioural skill not only for the social life of individuals, but also for a correct and peaceful coexistence on the Internet, where the spread of unfair interpersonal dynamics is the order of the day. To explore these dynamics, it is necessary to start with People.
Talent: the talent of human capital trascends space and time
If technology enables relationships, then talent simplifies, enhances and focuses them.
Talent may not be inborn, but rather a learned talent, based on David Perkins’ definition of learned intelligence.
Working with and on organisations, we wanted to give an organisational interpretation to Perkins’ vision, actually experiencing how the learnable intelligence is not only to be found in the individual but also in the organisational context and it is indeed the latter that becomes an enabling context for the emergence and continuous development of talent.
Talent has its own dimensions: it moves through time and space.
The time factor of talent must be liberated from the anagraphic factor and must be explored in terms of the “employability” dimension of the person, which has its true distinguishing value in the curiosity to learn “all the time”.
All this talk cannot be disconnected from the space factor of talent. The “unbounded-beyond-the-border” context requires action and reflection beyond our own reference system. It becomes fluid, multiform, multiverse to the point of becoming an ecosystem capable of generating a continuous spillover of resources, skills and experience among individuals and organisations and beyond the boundaries of one’s own organisation.
Organisations should develop trajectories of giftedness more than just a few talents
a term coined to indicate the ability to develop and model talent as an attribute that is no longer individual but organisational, characterised by:
- timelessness– People with a growth mindset and open to learning whatever their age
- bidirectionality– Continuous spillover of skills, assets and experience between Company and Person and between Companies and their ecosystems of reference
- collectivity – ability of the company to bring out collective intelligence and talent
- distribution– Talent as an ecosystemic scale that can be identified outside the company to be valued inside it.
Trust: the value of trust and trust that creates value
“Despite being employed in the factory of ideas, I refused to clock in.
I was also mobilised in the army by my ideas and deserted.
I didn’t understand much, there is never much, not even a little.
There is more.
Other means that I love who I like and what I do”.
Jacques Prévert (Despite myself, Love Poems 1946).
For Jacques Prévert, love is the only salvation in the world, and it is not a simple and unencumbered love, but one that is multifaceted and deserves to be cultivated on a daily basis, so trust is like the air we breathe: when it is there no one notices, when it is missing everyone notices.
Indeed, trust is, like love, a “gamble” and as such exposes those who decide to exercise it to a degree of risk in relation to an individual, an institution and an undertaking. At the same time, trust is an accelerator in relationships: with trust, value is generated for it and the environment in which the relationship develops. This assumption for organisations is reflected in the deliberate and judicious creation of a working environment that is based on trust in the talent of each individual.
The concept of trust, in the business context, also becomes a measurable parameter as the value it generates is economic. Confirming the link between trust and business growth are the economic sciences and the views of authors such as Kenneth Arrow, who won the Nobel Prize in 2012.
Today, however, the scenario is a challenging one for management: trust is an asset that is growing as its size increases, but it is limited by the climate of uncertainty and the failure of managers to create contexts that foster a sense of responsibility, proactivity and autonomy rather than supervision through control and command. Managerial insecurities, from what we have observed, amplified by the dimension of remote and home working.
However, Trust is the key element to be able to respond to the need for challenges and the new perimeter of values to which we have been brought into lockdown: perceiving trust in the company results in the alleviation of conflicts, the enhancement of mistakes as spaces for learning, and most importantly it is a soothing and regenerative balm for the durability of the relationship between Person and Organisation.
The element that leadership today must stimulate in order to pursue the goal of a lasting and credible Trust is that of emotional intelligence, as defined by Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves: “Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognise and understand one’s own emotions and those of others and the ability to use this awareness to manage one’s own behaviour and relationships with others”.
Trust is the real bond between People, an alternative model as opposed to the traditional model of control and aiming to build more fluid relationships.
The angle we understand, sees trust as a means of generating value: the company can deliberately and with the appropriate skills build an environment oriented towards and by trust. The system must also be a source of trust both internally and externally.
It is an asset which companies today must think about in strategic terms, since – following the concept of generating trust for internal and external at the same level – it can allow a deep involvement of People and a high level of integration and loyalty of the reference market.
There are two levels of trust in organisations: trust in oneself and trust in others. The former has a strong influence on the action and is projected onto the target. Trust in others, on the other hand, is based on an agreement between the parties, assuming that neither will break the agreement and that any violation will be punished.
However, the two plans share four characteristics:
- Freedom
It is never an intentional act to trust and be able to be trusted. Trust is a distinctly moral act insofar as it never depends on an external obligation, but only on an obligation within the subject itself. In other words, trust is based on the autonomy of the individual.
- Reciprocity
There can be no one-way trust: that would be naïve or, worse, a subtle power play aimed at making the other person submit to their will by handing over infinite responsibility.
- Honesty and authenticity
This is the transparency required mainly when one is no longer able to comply with the agreement. The latter is in itself a promise, therefore presupposes sincerity as a precondition (a false promise is in itself unjust). But this does not mean that promises must be kept indiscriminately: to break a promise without losing trust (which remains the fabric of the relationship) there must be the willingness to declare one’s limitations.
- Clarity
The content of the agreement must be clear. We cannot accept or provide total and unlimited trust. This means that there is always content, implicit and explicit, that defines the boundaries of the trust that is offered and required. Trust is a bit broader than the agreement: one can trust a person in general, but not everything.
In this sense, individual and social action need trust, but cannot be based on the naive assumption that it is a guarantee. No one has the power to do anything, neither their own nor that of others. But action cannot proceed, it cannot even happen the first time, if one does not bravely and fearlessly hold out hope in the possibility that things will turn out as hoped. Without this reasonable confidence, nothing is possible.
The manager who is prepared to invest strategically in the asset trust must start from the three assumptions theorised by Davenport and Prusak: trust must be visible, widespread and must start from the top.
What can be done to build trust?
Our long experience in organisational development, corporate culture and change management projects has led us to identify a range of possible interventions that take into account the different levels of commitment, involvement and complexity that organisations are actually able to sustain. In this context, it is possible to set up interventions with a limited commitment, such as workshops with a focus on competence, such as theoretical benchmarks; self-assessments, how do I position myself with respect to the theme; experience on competence , what do I develop; pilot interventions that allow restricting action to a group: a work group, a business unit, a division; up to cultural change interventions with actions addressed to the entire corporate population, aimed at building – or renewing – the agreement of trust within the organisation.
We live in an era of widespread mistrust that affects all spheres: social, institutional, economic. In addition to this consideration, there is also the growing complexity at which all the contexts of civil and organisational coexistence and the related models of relations are suddenly transforming: they are increasingly social, networking-oriented, based on models that are no longer only hierarchical and on weak-link, networked or circular systems.
Against this background, it has become imperative to set in motion a process of organisational regeneration that strategically and carefully focuses on the expression of each person’s talent, stimulated by a trust-generating context and the balanced use of technology at the heart of human and professional relationships: as Sophia would say, we are human, we deserve it.