Rachel Botsman | INBOUND 2019

hello thank you for being here welcome everybody to the inbound studio I'm Laura Moran hopefully some of you were downstairs to see Rachel in her spotlight talks and so thank you so much for joining us up here as much a little bit more intimate you can see here yeah brighter all the things I you know you're such an expert on trust and Technology and the relationship between those two things obviously you've talked a bit about that but I would love for you to just talk a little bit about how you define trust and how that's changed over the last couple years in particular yeah so how many of you are at the talk just sign Oh quite a few years so um what Trust is in itself hasn't changed so the way my definition of trust is that it's a confident relationship wouldn't the unknown so the idea that trust is changing trust in itself is changing and the role of trust isn't actually true what's more interesting is this idea that Trust is in crisis and whenever I hear this idea that trust in crisis it sort of sends a message that it's going down right there's less trust in the world and that's not what I believe is happening so the way I think about trust is more like energy and anyone who's a physicist will know that you can't destroy energy energy changes form and so what's happening in the world and it's causing chaos to be honest is that for a long long time as society trusts float upwards it flowed upwards to we believe religious leaders and we believed economists and we believed scientists and experts we believe politicians some of us and trust really was flying higher our core so in institutions right trust flowed from the top and that is being blown up and so I talked about this idea of distributed trust that what technology naturally wants to do is take this really sort of rigid up word trust and it spreads it out in these different patterns and that is a problem in many ways because institutions want to hold on to the old way of doing trust it takes power away from people and it causes really interesting things to happen so as I was thinking about you know sitting down with you and talking and thinking about all of that I have no idea if this is true but what kept coming to me was when we think about some of these technologies like you know say an uber or door - even just letting people come arrive to your house with me or anything like that is there a relationship or a correlation between like trust and trusting and the convenience factor of it all it's a great question so sometimes and I hate to admit this because like I like to champion just convenience with Trump trust yeah you know I was thinking about this of the other day I was in Mexico City and it was really really late and I have to say I really believe in the goodness of most strangers like I have a real high faith in strangers and I just like turn on my uber and got in the car and you know like this is like this is really important not a good idea yeah right and I was actually an event and the organizers like look just wait 15 minutes and I was like I can get home in two and so that's an example of convenience trumping yeah trust and but I think the mistake is that and I have to say Amazon it's not I have an issue with them as a company but I think they often mistake trust in the brand with a loyalty to the convenience mm-hm and their relationship is actually quite fragile because if they did something that damaged people's trust in a way would they still value that convenience so sometimes we're really lazy when it comes to trust yeah because we'd have to make a little bit of a self sacrifice around the convenience to really say no I value the trust more do you think you know in your research is that acknowledged or is it subconscious like do are we are we quick to trust and the convenience is there but we're not really making that conscious decisions well you don't um if we thought about every decision yeah like do I trust you right I did I trust the hotel like you wouldn't be able to leave the house right you don't want to be thinking about trust decisions every moment of the day but what I do think is that in many of our lives I talk about this idea of a trust pause there we need to slow down and what technology does is it it speeds things up and efficiency can be really really bad for trust friction is really good for trust and so one of the things that is a little bit worrying is if you think about the speed that people share information or the speed that people accept on terms of conditions or the speed that we was quite right on a date mm-hmm it's like we haven't really had the time to look for the information and say to ourselves is this a smart trust decision so speed it can be really problematic when it comes to some trust decisions I wasn't down in this valley room but I did hear that you asked a question about like who do people trust least ask for a round of applause I wasn't to do above appropriate what it any of those people that you called out quite frankly what is their responsibility and anybody else in a position like that running a company where we are you know giving over trust probably quite quickly what is their responsibility do you think with you know holding the data that we give to them or holding the trust that we as consumers just hand over yeah it was I've never actually done the exercise with the same leaders as the brands yeah so for me it was actually a first two people had a very different response to Amazon to be sauce which I think is really interesting one of the things the observations I make with companies particularly within a trust crisis is they under s make that responsibility and they will often point to something that happened or point to a system error or point to a problem that is out of their control and now the Facebook leader is like I think the meat is actually giving them quite a hard time but the piece they're getting wrong in their narrative is they are not communicating their intentions enough and they have not demonstrated enough empathy and for what people feel so they keep coming back saying this is a capability problem and we can fix this when we change our systems and don't worry like you won't see the same issues with the next election but no one believes them because they're like what is fundamentally changed in your business model yeah your business model depends on you owning my data and using my data and so until people and this is something that it's really hard for leaders to sort of even process that they in their hands have the decisions around company's intentions yes it's it's really damaging for trust is there anything that you think based on what you know that we as consumers like can and should be doing better upfront for our own personal relationship with that trust we're giving yeah I mean I think it's it's um sounds a little dramatic to say but you can vote with trust mm-hmm right so I have a really hard time when people are bad-mouthing a company and saying they don't believe this but they still use them and we're all guilty of that right like you know I still order things from Amazon and I don't agree necessary what they've done to the book industry like we're all guilty of that but I think this particularly with financial services this is something I've become really conscious of right now like how are they using my funds that I give them in what they're investing in and if they're investing in companies that I don't believe a trustworthy I don't want my funds with that ridiculous Bank so that's where I've made a really conscious choice in my life to be like you know what it's not okay that you increase interest rates but you don't increase my saving interest right that that doesn't show me an alignment of interest so you don't get my money anymore yep what led you into this work into this being your you know focus area of research so I like really big complex things in the world really difficult to understand that I believe need to be simplified because they if we understand them we can see the world in a different way like that's when I'm really drawn to and it sounds really funny but I actually lived in America for almost ten years and I was working with the Clintons mm-hmm and it was mine Hillary I was working on the foundation in the very early days and it was when Hillary first announced that she was going to run against Obama and it was it was a real conflict of interest to me this was a very big Obama supporter long story short Hillary actually realized very early on that she didn't understand technology and she didn't understand the way technology was mobilizing people and the way people were sharing information and the way the Obama team did and I just started deeply looking into that like how is he forming trust through these digital tools and you got to remember like that first campaign ran even before the smartphone had launched yep people didn't have the phone in the hand it was like only later on in the election cycle that famous speech in Berlin where you saw all the phones up that was a real moment and so I became like just very intrigued with this idea that technology was gonna change the way that we could trust one another and and then this hunch started to form that the way people were starting to share photos and they were sharing videos and they were sharing music who was going to move into other areas of our lives and then I started studying like drug dealers and the dot web and they understand trust and reputation better than most people right and you you interview those people and and it just became this really fascinating well what's next are there new areas of this same topic are there new topics are there ideas of how you think our relationship with technology is going to continue it to evolve based on what you've learned yeah I mean it's it's funny I feel like I felt like my work tends to sort of happen in these five year chapters I don't know why like you could you fill these ideas coming up and they're really annoying right when they first start to come up because they I call them like threats like and you start seeing this and hearing this and then you start dreaming about it and then you're just quite boring really because you haven't figured it out but you know there's something there and so all the work on trusts and listening to the questions that people have been asking me and I get asked a lot of questions around the truth and the relationship to trust them faint news and has led me to a whole different question that I don't know the answer to which is why do we believe what we believe mm-hmm and how can you believe certain things around vaccinations or in my house like my mum has one view on brexit and my dad has another and it's always an argument or my five-year-old believes in God and my eight-year-old believes in science and they can disagree about it and so I'm starting to look at the relationship of influence and trust interest what influences us in the world today and whether that's the same as a hundred years ago and how technology will impact that so one of the areas that really concerns me is deep fakes I'm really scared that we won't have a shared sense of reality I'm really scared that in the legal system we won't be able to take photographic evidence and visit video evidence I'm really scared that people who have genuinely lied can point to a video and now call it a deep thing so that's and I'm reading and I'm not finding the answers I'm finding a lot of hype and hysteria yeah but I want to know what shapes my beliefs so what does that look like for you like you've got this idea yeah you're not finding the answers how do you then go about that next step of you know finding the answers or doing the work to get further along in being able to tell us some of those answers so the answers will take about five years yeah and I'm very patient now that I know like it's that journey they start and stories so with this I have gone out and sat down with people who have very different beliefs from my own so I have just spent three months with people who did not believe in vaccinations okay now as someone who I lost my eyesight went as a child because I wasn't immunized for some reason and I got measles and luckily it came back and I want to understand why how did those beliefs form did something happen to them was it a friend was it something they saw on Facebook and you know what I found is that if you listen to them without judgment uh-huh you say I don't agree with you but I want to understand where you come from they will share their deepest fears they will say it's so nice to actually be listened to versus people shouting at them and calling them an anti-vaxxer uh-huh and that's they don't no one wants to be anti anything right so now I'm doing it with people who have very extreme diets like the potato diet or the banana diet or like it sounds funny but these people like they have I just spent like a week with this guy called chicken connoisseur right he posts a video people eat chicken and four million people watch that video and like does he know the responsibility he has when he gives that chicken restaurant a really bad rating like it's so interesting when you step into he was lives and you tried to understand like how they're being influenced and do they see that responsibility so it's a long-winded answer yeah yes that's in the beautiful place of people's stories of human beings and once I you know now I've heard many anti-vaxxers I have a hypothesis and then I go and do like academic research with it's the boring part but it's it's I mean there's amazing research out there so and then it all and then I I'm always drawing and designing that's they always draw the ideas so that's how it stays yeah what does that like I mean it's a creative outlet of course but what does that do for you drawing them it's amazing so when you draw you capture it in a very immediate royal way right and you you're like bringing it to life and drawings or something I have these little white cards so I don't have a notebook because I find we're really precious when we have a notebook right so have these white cards and I just draw things over and over and out and it's amazing because you can see the ideas evolve and then you don't lose them I finally like I have terrible handwriting so I write like this in Island told me her son I have no idea what that you know I tried recording it and they get hours of tape and so the drawing is my way of freeing myself and I hate the writing I mean people laugh right like they're like you're an author and you hate writing I'm like it's like someone who finds running really hard but they love the marathon they hate the trainer yeah but they love the marathon and for me that's what writing books are like it's like an intellectual marathon that I get the end I'm like I did that I hated it I mean it's just so much pain but I'm gonna do it again uh-huh it was too much information no I really I was like I'm so fascinated by I wanted can when you look at or when if I looked at that drawing would it mean anything to me or does it only mean something to you um I never mean also I I don't know like I think some of them you'd go oh yeah but I get that and others you'd be like what like I mean you'd be like that's a squiggle with a circle and an arrow coming down because it's something conceptual going on in my head yeah I like it's like so the whole idea of Institutional dress and distributed trust and you literally started with a triangle and an explosion mm-hmm that was it right I still had those drawings and that's the idea that it didn't move that far it just like a greenhouse so it's often my advice to writers is that they've they've just become too even academics they become too precious over the question that they've set themselves and so if you find a process that is really quick dead cheap to do and if you want to keep it private it's it's fine it's it's amazing it's really really helped my work I love that I'm so fast I do do anything with them like do you frame them or hang them no I do frames like white and she said like can we put the mop where do you want to put mountain they're like the bathroom I was like oh that's like kind of offensive they're like no because it's like you know it's a compliment because people have time okay so I was like someone on the new you woman to make my sketch like know I've actually socks furred and you know my students say they're brilliant and they're really smart but they are like so stressed and it's so worried about performing and reading and they should read now I should say that they should read but and I get them to draw and they hate it in class one and their drawings they are I mean I calling an unlikable like that's terrible right but the end of the course they are especially people find it very hard to speak in class 783 students they stick your hand up and they're like look what I did I drew this thing and you're like that is genius like I've never seen it in that way because what they're doing is that people can often translate what they see into a picture or a diagram fall quick and then they can into words yeah so yeah I love this I'm gonna start drying quick mastery school and my drawing is now I'd like to do a budget for crayons and they're like this is Oxford University I was like it I'm buying the crowns like it's five pounds right now seriously give me the most efficient like a Colgate crown you know next and Lego now that you've been with us here joining for the spotlight for here you know the studio if you could leave this inbound audience with any you know one thing that you really want them to take away what is that I think it's actually that it takes a long time to take a complex idea and make it simple so if you pick something up in your life and you don't quite get it so I've been reading a lot about vulnerability and I keep like taking these books away because I don't know why I like something like I love Ronnie Brown and Dan : I cannot and then I realized it's because I hate being vulnerable and so that's the thing I leave with you is that often when your minds or even your bodies are resisting understanding something you know don't like feel like but keep coming back to it and keep asking yourself the question like why and I not understanding this because I think one of the problems in the world today is we're like on a sugar candy rush for advice and information and understanding things and the one thing I try to do in my work is rigor simplified in some kind of beautiful way and that's that's why I'd ask people to do I love that one final question yes we asked everybody I asked everybody what does inbound mean to you the word yep being here is the word it's vague on purpose um well you know I think in ma'am for me I'm not going to describe the word because I don't know how describe the word but um to be honest like selfishly I I lived in Boston and I realized I lived here over 20 years ago and I think this place has I just remember being incredibly happy here so this is one of the first times I've been back so it's a very selfish answer to your question that um it made me when I came back here it made me realize like Boston was a very happy chapter in my life so oh well that's wonderful I'm so glad that we bring you back to Boston for that but thank you so much for being here in the studio thank you so much for being at inbound it's been absolutely wonderful having you goodbye sweet friends now thanks everybody

Channel: INBOUND

Views: 307

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: the inbound studio, inbound studio, inbound, innovative, leader, thought, inspiring, inbound19, inbound2019, marketing, sales, growth

Id: oTGni4lJ8Nc

Length: 21min 43sec (1303 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 11 2019