Trust and Facing the Unknown (with Rachel Botsman)

Said Business School. An incredibly impressive woman who now has a new audio book out called How to Trust and Be Trusted. Rachel, Welcome to Risky Business, and let's talk about trust.

the more trust that you need. And it's kind of the antithesis of how a lot of trust theories think about trust, because they'll say trust is knowing exactly what to expect or knowing what the outcome is, and that's always struck me as strange, because if you know how things are going to turn out, then you don't need a whole lot of trust.

And so as I was listening to your audiobook, that actually that was a theme that kept coming up, right, that one of these major issues in trust is control, when we have it, when we don't have it, How we can give it up, to whom we can give it up when we give it up. I'd love for you to talk a little bit more about that and about kind of the risk calculus. How does that decision making process work when it comes to trust.

And this can look like all kinds of things. So during the pandemic, or during a political period of term, or like all the time, or during a serious environmental crisis like the wildfires, the need to not just find information, but find information that makes you feel a little bit more in control. So, oh, the air quality is actually okay,

so I'm going to go outside. Those things really set off our control alarms all the way through to recognizing that when you don't trust someone, you tend to become more controlling, you tend to become a micromanager, and that plays out at work big time, in partnerships and relationships, but also in friendships and as a parent. To make this roll, I have two children, thirteen and eleven. The eleven year old can be trusted to do her homework,

she's the girl, and not to make gender stereotypes. Then not so much. So he has to do it at the kitchen table with this dot clot with me watching him or working alongside him. That's very controlling right now. If I trusted him, he could do upstairs in his bedroom without me watching him and me not have to ask him the questions. So control is a sign of lack of trust in ourselves, in others in the external.

And I'd love your take on this, but one of the things that worries me is that in the age that we live in, this illusion of control I think is sort of going up. So even if you think about health monitoring, I'm running a marathon a few months and I cannot believe how much data there is available to tell me what's going on in my body. And all of a sudden, there's quite enjoyable thing where I shouldn't really worry about the outcome. I should just enjoy

the journey. It's like you become a control freak around this data, and the reality is I'm not in control as to whether I get injured. I'm not in control whether it's hot or freezing cold on that day. And so I feel like this illusion of control, largely created through technology, is reducing our tolerance to friction. And this is really a crisis in many ways because you throw

people into situations not of uncertainty, just of malfriction. They have no patience, they're in tolerant, and I think it's sort of a hidden issue that isn't being spoken about enough.

stop wearing those devices, stop monitoring yourself. You know, it's actually it's not good. It's not healthy, and you're probably losing more than you gain, especially sleep devices. Don't get me started, But I think that you're pointing out something really important, which is that we are becoming in some ways less tolerant of uncertainty, less tolerant of the unknown. And there is this relationship. You know, how tolerant you are, how much you can embrace it, and both how much

you trust and how trustworthy you are right yourself. And there's something that you said that I found really beautiful. You said you know, nothing new happens in the node, which I think is such a lovely thought. So I'd love to talk a little bit about that and about how kind of because this is something that I think a lot about right, how embracing risk, right, embracing uncertainty can actually be very liberating and can actually help you make better decisions as opposed to being afraid of it.

that fatigue is because I'm not in the unknown enough. Right, Like I'm going to go into a classroom, I'm going to get on stage, I'm going to write a piece and I kind of know how it's going to turn out, and so that takes effort, and that takes work to shake that up. So just a personal example, I've I used I see myself as an artist and I've always made art, and I was like, right, I'm going to go back to this because that is a world where I don't speak that language and I have no connections,

and I am a beginner. I am starting again. I'm very much in the unknown, and I've found that risk taking that it's so energizing. Yes, it is frightening, but you just feel that capacity expanding again. Like it's like it's more than the curiosity that you have when you're a child. It's like you can hold more. It's you know.

Keats uses that wonderful phrase of negative capability, and I think sort of the opposite of risk taking is all the positive capabilities, right, the skill, the competence and knowledge, And what we're missing is that negative capability, that ability to hold much and to be in the unknown. And to do that you have to take risks. You have to be a beginner, you have to try new things. And it's so easy to forget that as especially when you get later on in life.

And I think that's true on all levels, both being you know, doing something that's just easy and familiar, and also kind of on on a level of trusting someone just because they seem familiar. It's something that makes you feel secure. But that's not necessarily good, right, And that's not necessarily the correct basis on which to trust, which I think brings us to kind of one of your points, one of the lessons from your book, which is, you know the fact that like who do you trust? Who

don't you trust? Is a bad question, right, and you have to then say to do what? Yeah, and what what are you actually basing this on? And it's all it all has to do with context. Let's talk a little bit about that and tell us a little bit about your nanny as well, because it's such a great illustration of a lot of these themes and brings us back to you know, who you trust, why you trust them?

Is familiarity good or bad? You know, all risk, all of these things, risk versus comfort, all of these things.

is highly contextual. So the reason why I say it's off the missed is when you look at the way people talk about trust in the media, or I don't trust that politician, or I don't trust that platform, or it's spoken about in very generalized terms, and that is problematic because blanket trust is a very bad thing. You don't want to be trusted to do everything. And one of the ways to improve your own trust skills is to understand where you are trusted and where you're not,

and that's the trust gap. The nanny story or I won't tell it all because it's quite long, and so what happened was when we were around five. My dad my mum were very busy. They were both entrepreneurs and they were traveling a lot to America. We live in the UK, and so they needed to hire a nanny to look after my brother and I and they hired

this woman. I think I changed her name to Doris or stick with her, okay, And I'll never forget the day she walked in our house because she had this very thick Scottish accent, and my name is Rachel, so every time she said my name, you know, she rolled her arms and she had one of those really ruddy Scottish faces, like like they've been for a long walk over the highlands and then they're going to have a nice cup of tea and a biscuit and she was

always baking as well. I remember that. But the day she walked in, she was wearing a uniform, and the uniform she was wearing was for the Salvation Army and she was carrying at tambourine, which I thought was immensely exciting as a four or five year old. The point was, that's why my parents hired her, because they told her my parents. She told my parents that she was belonged to South Asian Army. They now realize how influential the Scottish accent was because of course there was no email,

there was no video conferencing. It was all done by phone, so those trust singles were really important. Well, listeners will have to listen to the book to hear the whole story. But she lived with us for nine months and it turned out she was running a massive drugs ring in North London and then she disappeared and she used our family's Volvo Silva Volvo as a getaway card an armed robbery. I mean, like, so I don't know where if that's my fascination which rus came from that.

under it. And the fact that you know, if you think about it logically, right, you're your father's a smart man, entrepreneur, Like you just have to say, huh, what is going

on in the brain of this incredibly intelligent person. And it's one of these things where you know, I've written about con artists a few books back, and you know, you see these patterns of smart people, people who know better, and yet they end up in these situations where they keep trusting, they keep ignoring red flags because it's convenient, right, And and it also it also says something about you, Right, you don't want to be the person who left your

kids with a drug dealer, right, So it's easier to say no, no, she really is trustworthy. Those things aren't true, even though it's your kids, right, and if there's any chance that this person is going to be involved in an armed robbery, get your kids the fuck out of there. But it's just all of these computing computing things, which is huge.

can't extricate ourselves from that situations. I think it's just a fascinating human flaw.

still kind of figuring out what that means. I think it means that I'm good at reading the room and I'm good at reading energy versus predicting how things are going to turn out, which I think is what people think intuition is, right, It's more of a I see it as more reading the state someone is in and how engaged they are with you versus what's going to happen. And when I challenge people to say, look, it's not the intuition is a bad thing, particularly in situations where

you recognize that pattern. It's the lack of information. So when you rely on the intuition and you just don't have enough reliable information, people hate this idea that they're like, this flies in the face of emotional intelligence, and this, you know, this is going to slow down decision making and what do you expect that we're going to get all this information about people? And how do we know

if the information is really liable? And I find it really interesting that it sparks something so visceral and deep in people that they rely on the intuition.

it's all very you know, very precise. And yet when I say something like you should not trust your gut, you should not trust they get so upset, right because even someone's so mathematical to them, it seems like there's you know, the sixth sense, there's something else that like that you know has to be has to be there, And I have to say, well, sometimes your gut is right, right, but you need to ask, like, what is it based on where's the information coming from? Do I have expertise

in this right? Is this something that is just unconscious expertise or is it something that is just a feeling based on who knows what? Right? And it could be very good pattern recognition, or it could be bullshit, but people really do not like to hear that, and it's it's that's a I think that's such an interesting point about trust.

to make a decision. And that is so much to do with sort of the invisible hand of algorithms, So the vertical nature of fees where you can find things to validate how you're feeling, not even that day, that moment, that then becomes the way you make a decision, and that really frightens me. This idea of feeling your way through a decision versus looking for reliable information.

with the decision at hand. And there's even a term called mood as information when we use kind of the mood we're in as information when we shouldn't. Right, it's a it's a major fallacy, and it really influences decisions

in a negative way. Let's talk about something a little bit more positive, because you you in reviewed some really interesting people who have used trust in really interesting ways, and I was, you know, some very inspiring people like the Spanish teacher ms rad right, who who is Well, why don't you tell us a little bit about her? And about this distinction which I think is really really nice that you make between earning trust and building trust.

But actually the outcome of the year is that they've learned how to trust someone and that someone trusts them. And there's so much to the things that she does. But what I realized, we're listening to listen to it again. First of all, everything she does is free, like it's not big gestures, they're really small things. So she makes sure before the first day of term she knows every child's first name and last name, and not only that, she knows their interests. She speaks to the other teachers.

She finds out what they enjoy, where they're struggling, even where they like to sit in the classroom, and so you know, when they walk in, they're like, Oh, this person cares. They took the time to understand all these things. She works on the premise that she's a giver of trust, so they don't have it, and so many teachers don't

do this right. Like it's like you have to prove yourself to me, and that proving yourself to me is such an old way of thinking about power, which, to your question, is tied to this distinction between how do I build trust versus how do I earn trust? When you say how do I build trust, that is like I'm going to behave in a certain way and then

I expect you to follow me. I expect you to do something for me, versus what miss Rad was demonstrating is that actually, you know, you have to continuously earn trust, and the best way to do that is to give it first, and then it becomes this really powerful loop.

You know, you have the example of it Spencer reports, Right, Okay, fine, like how do I expense this bottle of wine? Like how do I figure out a way to screw you over? Because you don't trust me?

is about cheating. But you find that when you have these kinds of things and people feel like they can cheat, right, they feel like and they can feel like they can do things like take office supplies home, take stuff from the fridge that was brought from the office and just take it home, and they don't feel like that's stealing, even though it is right, that's not why it's therefore, but they're like, well, you know, if you're if you're not trusting me, if you're doing all of these things,

then I'm going to act accordingly. And in this classroom, you see, you know, students who misbehaved and who were problems students suddenly become leaders and really promising students because of this trust dynamic shift. And I think that this is just such a powerful and wonderful lesson that we can use in a lot of different cultures. Right your school, even though I think it's incredibly important in the classroom, but I think it's important as we think about corporate

cultures all the way up. And it's it's a point that I think people don't necessarily understand because sometimes they think that, well, you know, you need to kind of you need to urge, you need to you need to kind of micro manage and do these kinds of things, because well, who are they, right, I'm the boss.

And then she admitted she didn't really understand the difference between those things, which is interesting in itself mistrust, distrust, lack of trust. But then she said, you know, do you know what to me, like when I've been in a work environment and you can just feel like someone took the plug out and the trust is seeping out that organization. She said, you know, you owned a goldfish, and you can imagine like she's doing this in an

NBA lecture hall. It's about one hundred and twenty students, and I'm like, yes, I owned a goldfish and it was called Flash Gordon. I'm trying to give her permission to tell the story here, and she's like, your goldfish was called Flash Gordon. I was like, could we get

to the mesophor so. Then she says, you don't only own a goldfish, and you're not a particularly responsible pet owner golfish owner, and you don't fill the bowl up, and gradually, over time the water goes down and you don't really notice the water going down until one day you come home. And she did this with actions. The fish is gold ping like like like it can't breathe, it's suffocating, and the fish is about to die. And she said that's what I think happens to trust, is

like it just dissipates until people feel suffocated. So I think this is It really struck me because the Edelman Trust Barometer just came out, which bigs feelings about and gallop at the same time the biggest trust surveys, and both of them showed that the lowest the highest trust falls. So the biggest difference in trust points it's not in politics or media, it's in employees. It's like a ten point four in employee engagement and trust. And that's that's

very right. It's huge right that you always be with disengaged and or they are not behaving well, and that is that is toxic for both sides.

easy to miss. It's very easy to not have the communication infrastructure needed to kind of have those cycles not take place, and then you end up like a gold being goal fish and you're not quite sure how to fix it, and then you get a consultant in there, and you end up refilling the water tank without actually addressing any of the issues that made the water go down in the first place. So you know, maybe you refill the water, but you know that goldfish is not going to do well.

l Maurice Maurice right. And I did get to stay in one as a work project, which was a real.

And they're so good at doing it that they run a training program where they don't just train their own staff, they train British Airways, Marks and Spent, all these companies around the world train on culture because they know how to do it. And the thing that struck me was that, first of all, he'd worked in every single department of the hotel. He'd even like been on the roof or

repaired the air conditioners. You know, he'd been in the wash and not like for the day, you know how some of the CEOs do it for an hour like a rotation. He understood the hotel like a body. He understood the nervous system, He understood the components, and he knew how all of this was interconnected and if one thing went down, how it impacted others. So that was just like, wow, how many leaders understand the whole ecology

and cultural system of their business. The other thing that I thought was just incredible was how much he empowered his team to do the right thing. And you know, this wasn't like the mised alarm call. He spoke about a lot because that's a big thing, and that if they missed an alarm calls. I mean people still use alarm calls, which I find strange that the personal reception has the autonomy to book another flight a business class fight without any kind of approval, regardless of the cost.

that's life. It happens all the time. People are going to break your trust on an individual level and on an institutional level. How do you respond to that?

breaking down. And yes, of course those things are going to hur and there's a lot of repair to be done there, but it's it's micro moments that often, particularly if you're in a customer centric or even just an employee centric company, they're the things that people don't think about, like how do you empower people to repair those those things? And then the other key thing tied to risk, which I thought was really key, is he doesn't want people

to be risk adversed. He doesn't want his employees to be risk adverse. So it's how does he set the boundaries and be really clear about expectations so that they can play and they can delight, and they can do things still following service protocol. And I think that was just amazing to learn how they do that.

You know, we want our employees to be creative and innovative and blah blah blah. But it didn't work out, Oh you're fired. Right, What kind of a culture are you actually creating where you pay lip service to this but you don't actually inspire that kind of behavior because people are scared. They know that if you take a risk and it doesn't work out, that that's not good for you.

thinking about it. Is you know, when you're looking at all of these classic biases that Danny Kahneman talked about, right, risk aversion, loss of version, all of these fallacies of the human mind, right where you prefer the certain outcome over the gamble, even though the gamble has a higher expected value, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, they become

completely correct and not fallacious if you can't afford to lose. Right, if you are someone who you know you need this money to pay the rent, you need this money to get medicine, even though the risk might actually the expected value might be like millions, right, and you can get a sure thing of however much it is, you will take the shore thing or if the loss right, if you gamble and you could potentially make a lot, but you could also lose something that's going to affect your

ability to pay for your for your livelihood. You shouldn't take that gamble, right, because you should actually take the sure thing always. And so you see how all of these quote unquote fallacies can be completely correct depending on who you are, what risk context you're coming from, and so absolutely risk taking is a privilege. It means you can afford to lose. Right, you can afford the risk

of ruin and some people can't. And sometimes you don't understand why someone doesn't take a risk, and you have to ask, well, okay, what is it about their background? And this I think we've come full circles of trust. What is it about the trust kind of the support and everything about them that can enable them to take these sorts of risks And you know, something that you end with which I think is a good place for us turned And this is where it's going with trust sleeps,

right and confidence in the unknown. And I think trust sleeps are also a privilege, but I.

they think about it. And what she does is she says, actually, a trust sleep is when the child says the first word in Spanish, because when you speak in and the language and there's a risk that everyone is going to laugh at you in that class, like that's actually taking a risk, and that what she has to do is create the comfort and the security that no one's gonna

laugh and there's gonna be no repercussions. And the thing that they think about is like when those kids say the first word and everyone sort of looks at them with admiration, and then they start saying a whole sentence. That's the permission piece. That's what I mean by like if you think if listening says going, well, I'm just not very good at taking risks and I really don't enjoy them, and I don't even know how to take

a trust leap. Start really small, right because it's forward momentum, like once you feel it and you're like, oh no, I'm speaking a whole paragraph in front of the class. And I think a lot about those children when I'm trying to encourage people to take trust leaps. They don't have to be enormous physical feats. They don't have to

be leaving your job and starting a new company. They don't have to be taking a math bet or leaving your partner, whatever it may be, and she some of the most powerful trust leaps are really really small, where they get higher high, and they give you permission to discover something else about other people, about yourself, about your community, or about the world.

think you'll learn a lot. I learned a lot about the nature of trust and how we can be more trustworthy and also create more trust in the world, which I think is crucially important.