One of my earliest childhood memories is visiting my granddad’s clothes factory in the East End of London, happily sitting in the corner sorting out the boxes of different colored buttons. He knew all his employees and the details of their families’ lives. Trust was held together by the walls of the factory and face-to-face interactions. In many ways, trust in his workplace was simple: ordered, bounded, and structured.
Fast-forward 40 years, and my relationship to work has undergone a dramatic shift. Most days, I work in my office with my labrador at my feet. My hours are designed as much as they can be around my children’s school rhythms. I work with and trust people across time zones, many of which I’ve never even met face-to-face.
My son, who is just about to turn 13, in his spare time enjoys “working”—making limited edition virtual T-shirts in Roblox, which he sells for “Robux.” It’s “my world, and my rules,” he says about this AI-mediated game, which he trusts implicitly.
Three generations, three very different working and trust dynamics.
Trust in the context of work has a significant impact on the health of individuals, organizations, and society. I define trust as a “confident relationship with the unknown.” And that unknown is rapidly changing. Better understanding these generational shifts is essential to adapting to a future of work that increasingly looks more like my son’s experience than my grandfathers.
So, do we trust less or do we trust differently around work today?
The narrative around trust is that it’s in a worrying freefall, including in the workplace. A recent report by Gallup revealed that only 23% of employees trust the leadership of their organizations to “do the right thing.” On the flip side, a survey by Slack of more than 10,000 people worldwide revealed that more than one in four desk workers do not feel trusted by their employers. Low trust leads to higher stress and anxiety and a much lower sense of job satisfaction and belonging. Low trust has serious health and economic costs. Ones that exacerbate existing inequities.
But what if, instead of thinking about trust as in a monolithic unidirectional freefall, we considered it as something that shifts and changes form?
The Four ‘Trust Shifts’
Zooming out, historically there have been three significant “trust shifts” in work—local, institutional, and distributed. We’re currently in the early stages of entering the fourth: autosapient trust.
Local trust was when we lived and worked in small local communities. The carpenters, shoemakers, and blacksmiths, for the most part, knew each other. The ties of personal reputations bonded local trust: If you lied or stole, everyone would find out, and it would damage your future earnings.
The rise of overseas trade led to the development of new industries, including printing, shipbuilding, and banking. New mechanisms were needed to allow trust to scale beyond personal relationships and to address bigger unknowns. A period of innovation for trust flourished—insurance, contracts, brands, brokers, and agents. We entered the long era of institutional trust that was top-down, hierarchical, centralized, linear, and less equitable. The employer, not the employee, typically set the work boundaries.
Around 20 years ago, the advent of the internet and smartphones gave rise to a new era of distributed trust. It transformed how we create and share all kinds of assets through platforms and marketplaces and radically made people rethink what they wanted out of work. Independent workers found new ways to generate value in the “gig” or creator economies. People became less deferential to bosses, and there was a general dispersion of authority. Trust became fluid, sideways, peer-driven, decentralized, and in some ways, more equitably distributed and in others, more concentrated in the platforms.
The next trust shift
Distributed trust allowed people to exercise their agency around work in ways previously not possible, freeing themselves from the stresses of office politics, direct oversight of managers, and time-suck of commuting.
In the middle of this disruption, we’re at the dawn of another major shift in how trust works, probably the most significant of all. With the rapid emergence of artificially intelligent systems, the question of who and what we can trust is one of society’s most significant challenges. Welcome to the fourth trust shift in human history: autosapient trust.
I’ve work directly with these agents as tools, like typing a prompt to summarize a long research paper. However, they are still in the background or feel like something I have control over. My son, I’ve noticed, trusts AI tools to make decisions and solve problems on his behalf (often more than his teachers). It’s a blurry line between when trust in a someone and a something begins and ends.
To understand the disruption happening, it’s helpful think of trust like energy: It doesn’t get destroyed; it changes form. Local trust flowed sideways, directly from person to person. Institutional trust flowed upwards to leaders, experts, referees, and regulators. Distributed trust changed the flow back sideways but in ways and on a scale never possible before. Now, with the rapid advancement of AI, autosapient trust will flow through an AI agent.
How to support the fourth trust shift at work
Doomsayers will contend that AI and the rise of the fourth trust shift will mark the dehumanization of trust and lead to even greater inequities. I think the opposite is true: Humanness and creativity will become the differentiators. During this explosive phase of understanding AI’s possibilities, there are four critical trust points organizations should be focusing to ensure this trust leads to a more equitable future:
- Invest in training people at every level to develop the skills and instinct to verify before we trust information. “Verify, then trust” is only the way to become less susceptible to manipulation. Part of this is making the attribution of content and information part of your companies’ policy and culture.
- Boost people’s “creative confidence” with AI. For example, showing ideas rather than talking about them will become easier and more seamless. Trust and encourage people across all roles to express themselves in ways they never thought possible.
- Reimagine what dimensions of the organizations should be driven and enhanced by AI and what should become more human. Until now, skills and productivity have been a major differentiator for organizations. However, in the age of AI, empathy, critical thinking, and taste will feel scarcer and therefore valued more.
- Rethink how teams come together, physically and virtually, to find a harmonious and equitable working rhythm. A trusting work culture depends on human rapport and a shared sense of experience.
Throughout history as the nature of work has changed, so too has how we trust. Innovations have given rise to meet the challenge of these shifts—sometimes reducing inequities, other times widening them. The future of work doesn’t necessarily require more trust; it needs us to learn how to trust differently with an eye always pointing toward equity.