Revisiting the Way We Trust with Álvaro Marquez
Álvaro Marquez
In Season Three of 12 Geniuses, trust expert Álvaro Marquez joined the show. At the time, he and Don discussed the future of trust and how a disruptive global event could alter society’s concept of trust. Little did they know at the time how much trust would be compromised over the next 18 months as the Covid-19 pandemic spread throughout the world. In this episode, Don and Álvaro reconvened to analyze the different approaches countries took to handle the pandemic, how those responses affected the public’s conceptualization of trust and what those societies may look like going forward. They also discuss other topics around trust including autonomous cars and cryptocurrency.
Álvaro Marquez is the author of the Trust 2030 report, which he created with his former team at Method in partnership with Hitachi. The report outlines three potential scenarios for life over the next decade with regard to trust. His current role is global head of strategic design at icon incar, a design consultancy for automotive user experience based in Berlin.
Resources From This Episode
Connect with Álvaro on LinkedIn
Read the Trust 2030 report
Learn more about incon incar
Connect with Don on LinkedIn
Follow Don on Twitter
Read the Transcript:
Don MacPherson:
Hi, this is Don MacPherson, your host of 12 Geniuses. In January 2020, I met Álvaro Marquez in his flat in Eisbergen, Germany to record our interview about The Future of Trust. The first COVID-19 cases were just being identified in Europe and the United States. Little did we know how much trust would be compromised over the next 18 months. Who we trust. The individuals and the institutions may never be the same. That's what we discussed in this episode]. This episode of 12 Geniuses is sponsored by the Think2Perform Research Institute, an organization committed to advancing moral, purposeful, and emotionally intelligent leadership.
Álvaro, welcome back to 12 Geniuses.
Álvaro Marquez:
Thank you, really happy to be back.
Don MacPherson:
It's been... January 25th, 2020, since we talked and recorded your previous episode. If you can go back to and update our audience on the three societies and scenarios from the Trust 2030 report that you and your team produced back in 2019.
Álvaro Marquez:
Trust 2030 project is something we did for a client of ours, Hitachi. Big Japanese tech company. Big conglomerate. We were basically helping them conduct a piece of research that would inform the way they operate as a business in future. We were using a technique from design fiction and future casting call future studies. What this research does is lays out three possible societies. Then we use, for the sake of our arguments, a political scandal, a big leak in data that would basically shatter the foundation of people's trust in the way society operates.
This is a report that is, by the way, publicly available. You can download it if you google Hitachi Trust 2030, you'll be able to find a micro-site still there and download an abbreviated report of maybe, I don't know, 150 pages or so. Anyway, there is three societies that largely differ from each other, but overlap in some aspects. The first society spanning out of these event is fundamentally all about trust in individual one-to-one relationships. We call that society, Decentralized in Transparent society.
Then there is a society that is all about trusting the group, the wider group. That society's call "centralized and curated". There's another society, the third one, that is all about, "I just tried to trust in myself and in the network that I create." This society is what we call "distributed and anonymous". It's basically an opportunity to create a provocation for our clients. It's an exercise in strategizing where the value lies less in trying to evaluate whether these predictions are accurate or not. It's a way for a business to basically role-play how would they behave in certain situations, right? How would they conduct their business were the world to look this way or that way or that.
Don MacPherson:
I have been thinking about the conversation that we had 15 months ago. It was at the very beginning of this pandemic. In fact, we weren't sure that this was even going to be a pandemic when we were talking, but as the episode was released, it was pretty evident that the world was shutting down. Is this pandemic the catalyst? Is this the key event? What do you think about that as a hypothesis or as the triggering event here?
Álvaro Marquez:
It's not a data leak, but it has the same catalyzing potential. It definitely triggers a series of events, completely unforeseen that let's say give birth to radically different approaches to how we relate to each other in different societies. I have to think about it because I have many friends back in Shanghai and Beijing from the days we were living in China. Fundamentally, COVID has given the Chinese government the perfect alibi to continue the police state rollout. So under the guise of public safety and smart cities and smart society, now you require face recognition to enter your own building. If you have a guest, if you have any visitor, no matter whether they're local Chinese or they're foreigners, they need to register with the local police. You need to give your biometrics, you need to give a photo of your passport. You will not be let in if you don't behave like a proper citizen is expected. You have the system of points where it allows you to do or not do things, an equivalent of a credit score, but in terms of good behaviors.
You will not be able to hail a taxi if you have a bad score. You have other societies that are taking a completely different approach. I think the country where I'm living in Germany, is if anything, taking the radical opposite approach where it's only now where the government has officially mandated from a central point same standard and approaches to controlling the spread of the pandemic. Germany has a history with centralization of power. So it's very naturally decentralized and true federalism where things are decided in a local level. You could see two societies here. One that is all about the network and the decentralized way of making decisions at the expense of certain things, and another society who says, "This is what we were waiting for," and then we're centralizing control. Sure thing, you can walk around in Shanghai without a mask and sit in a restaurant. There's been, officially, no new cases for the past nine months, but at what cost?
Don MacPherson:
That's a really good point. My next question was, "Are we on a specific path?" It sounds like it depends on where you are. China obviously is highly centralized and curated, and Germany is transparent and decentralized. From your point of view, where do you think the United States is?
Álvaro Marquez:
Good question. Somewhere in between, I guess. I mean, you have the funny thing that... You've had elections in the middle... The previous administration, for the longest time, was even questioning whether the pandemic was a thing. Then you have a following administration who has been very quick to respond and to roll out vaccination programs and given society the tools it needs to get back on its feet. It's definitely neither one, right? It's somewhere in the middle. That's the interesting thing about The Future of Trust as a project, that it lays out a complementary view of events that are basically allowing each other to co-exist in different contexts. That's why, in a way, it's important to understand, "How do we create this kind of trust? What are the levers that we have to play with, and what are we willing to trade in exchange of that trust?" Right? How do you build it? How do you exchange it? How do you maintain it?
Don MacPherson:
When we talked initially, you had talked about a digital society and building trust in a digital society and this transition. Well, it seems like we've really made the transition over the last 15 months with virtual work. What advice do you have for people who are trying to build trust in a virtual world? Not only from a business aspect but from a personal aspect.
Álvaro Marquez:
Only speak from personal experience that is subjective, understanding of how trust travels. It is more important than ever to be really open and candid, and in a way, let down your guard. We have remote video conferences, and it works as good as it could, but there's still something about communicating beyond images and words. There's something about the body expression and the non-verbal cues that are missing. I think the only way I've realized or I try to create trust within my peers is being even more transparent and more candid in a way that is perhaps less pretentious. It's almost allowing someone into your heart and into your home. I think, for the time being, as long as things look the way they do now, just dial the human volume up. Just keep it real. Then we'll take things one step at a time.
Don MacPherson:
One thing that we did talk about last time was volatile cryptocurrencies. Those are your words. My goodness, they are volatile. I did a little bit of research just before we started talking today. Bitcoin, when we talked in January of last year was valued at just under $10,000. It shot up to over $60,000 and now is at $52,000. What does that say about the way we trust?
Álvaro Marquez:
From me, this is a great example of us trying to figure out, "How do we trust in a different context? How do we create units of value that can be exchanged just like paper money," right? If you think of money, away from crypto, just traditional money. It's a good proxy to a barter system where I can give you one cow for seven goats and two stacks of hay. Basically, you have a central bank who ensures that that piece of paper will hold value over time. That, "Yes, you can trust that when you exchange money with somebody else, I will be a big responsible body to ensure that that still has value."
Of course, as money continues to become digital, most of the transactions in the world today happen, there's no real money behind them. It's just like accounting, right? It's just on a spreadsheet. The crypto makes sense as the next logical step, but it's still very much bound by the laws of physics of today's money exchange mechanism and weirdly made like a hybrid with investment and stocks. I think it's a great experiment, crypto, and other currencies, but I think they're still a fringe movement.
Don MacPherson:
The reason why I ask that question is, I believe that there are some people who feel like people just don't trust. Actually, I feel like investment in cryptocurrencies is a sign that we do trust.
Álvaro Marquez:
We do. I believe that.
Don MacPherson:
We've talked about deep fakes and not trusting evidence and things like that. That is all true. Those are things that do break down trust. The fact that cryptocurrencies have taken off and regular people are talking about it does say something about what we are willing to trust and what we may not be willing to trust.
Álvaro Marquez:
Remember we talked about autonomous cars. Unfortunately, way too often you read a piece of news in the paper or online where somebody's been in an accident because they step out of their driver's seat and because they think that the Tesla is like KITT from Knight Rider. There's that level of, "We are ready to trust. We are willing to trust at the quickest most optimal time when things are in flux, but how many accidents will it take for us to start or not start trusting autonomous traffic?" Not even your vehicle, but the vehicle that comes away, do you trust that that will stop for you when you cross the street? You might trust the one you're sitting in and that you're comfortably going with.
Don MacPherson:
I've used vehicles in the past as an example of how we do trust. Even saying when you're on a two-way road, it's the middle of the night, and you don't know what that person is doing. If they're looking at their phone or if they've had something to drink, but you don't pull over. You trust that they're going to do what they're supposed to do. At the same time, we have big trust issues within our organization. We trust the person, who we don't know, who's approaching us in traffic at 55 or 60 miles an hour, 100 kilometers an hour, and we don't trust our CEO or our manager. It's really interesting where we are willing to put our trust. One more question for you. You became a father since we met.
Álvaro Marquez:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Don MacPherson:
How has that changed the way you trust? You hand off your child to daycare and... There's all these different elements. You pay more attention to traffic when you're walking down the street. It does change the way you view the world, right? It's not about you. It's way more about her.
Álvaro Marquez:
No, totally. No, it's absolutely about her. As cheesy as it sounds, it does make you feel like you want to be a better human. You want to be, as I said, making the world a better place feels a bit pretentious or difficult, but at least not making it worse. Taking care of the house you're living. In terms of trust, totally. She just started going to daycare, and it's been a very conscious, thoughtful onboarding process where we have learned to trust each other in a two-way situation, daycare and us.
We have slowly but surely increased the time that she's been spending there. Before that, there was a few interviews and get to know each other and chemistry check for my daughter to make sure that she felt okay there. No commitment, come spend a few hours in the afternoon. I think, like everything else, just little by little bit by bit. I'm generally, I don't know, trusting person, but it is true that when somebody approaches, you're raising an eyebrow, very quickly scanning, "Can I trust this person to say hello to the baby so close or not?" It sounds a bit terrible, but…
Don MacPherson:
That's nature. That's not just human nature, that's nature.
Álvaro Marquez:
That's nature, right.
Don MacPherson:
Well, this has been an awesome conversation. Álvaro, thank you again for being a genius.
Álvaro Marquez:
Thank you. Always a pleasure.
Don MacPherson:
Thanks for listening to 12 Geniuses. Next week's interview is with energy expert Lauren Azar. She talks about the latest advancements in green energy production, storage capability, and grid security. That episode will be released July 27th. Thanks for listening, and thank you for being a genius.
