FUTURE MATTERS: Cultivating Trust Claire A. Nelson

CULTIVATING TRUST FOR PEACE ON EARTH

By Claire A. Nelson

2021 has blown by like a hurricane. Space Tourism. The Omnicron Variant of the COVID 19 and the deflated expectations from COP-26. A lot has happened to change the trajectory of the future for the better in some ways it seems. And yet when we consider the statistics on crime, corruption, violence and wars, we seem to be worse off now that when we started. As I contemplate the Christmas season with its message of ‘Peace on Earth’ and ‘Goodwill to All’, I wonder why is it so hard for our species to be at peace, to cultivate peace, to envision peace. How and why is it, that despite all the technological marvels we have, we still are not happier? How is it that despite all ability to splice the genome and 3-D print body parts and send probes to Mars, we still don’t seem to have the tools to engineer our way out of the never-ending wars? How might we get to more peaceable futures? I wonder if the metrics we have in our rule books are not contributing to the problem. Perhaps we might get to peace faster if our economy measured and valued Gross National Happiness over Gross National Product. Perhaps we would be better off defining and deploying metrics about well-being or some other human-centric data, that address what people really want and need to help them thrive. But how does one really capture ‘how you are feeling about life?’ in a score? Or do you take account of subjective realities embedded in the question ‘how you are feeling about your opportunities for advancement in your city?’ This is a real question to be addressed so that the architects and engineers of the SMART Cities of the future fabricate the metrics that matter for improving on human wellbeing. This is needed if we are to achieve more peaceable futures, from the cloth of the society we have today.

We might begin by bringing in all the actors in the system at hand. Too often participatory planning begins and ends with the political leaders and captains of industry. Too often the ones who are assumed to be on the margins are excluded from the planning pool. The pool of leaders may sometimes extend to the leaders of the Main Street Chamber of Commerce, for example, but how are the leaders of churches, temples and mosques, Girl Scouts, homeless shelters, pre-kindergarten schools, sanitation workers, and juvenile detention centers included in the conversation about smart cities. When we talk about designing SMART City X 2050 (Mexico, Boston, London or New York) who decides who gets a seat at the table? If we’re to move towards peaceable futures that are conducive to human thriving, as opposed to the dystopian futures of the movies we love to fear, we need find the seeds to the soul of society. There’s this idea that technology is going to solve all our problems. But we live in a world of duality. It’s Yin and Yang. So quite often we set out to solve one problem, and we succeed in creating new problems. We invent self-driving autonomous SMART cars. But now we wait for the solution of how we are going to ensure that if the GPS network system winks out, we have a way to address in real time the cascading effect of thousands of suddenly offline self-driving cars in the hands of unskilled drivers. In addressing the design for SMART cities how will we take account of the second and third order impacts? Is there an APP for that?

I do believe that if we look at some of the fault lines of our society, around poverty and exclusion, there are ways in which we can use technology to support people’s empowerment and advance equity as envisaged by SDG 10, but this assumes that the people in question have the agency of confidence in themselves to first of all create a clear and compelling vision of the future they want. (And I might add feasible and accomplishable vision of the future.) For vision exists long before the creation of the path of purpose and missions to journey towards that future. And that future of the imagination is the birthplace of the material future being co-created. If the vision is so far from reality and seems like a fantasy e.g. a move from one murder a day to one murder a year, nobody will believe it to be possible and so there will be not enough social capital invested around that shared vision of the future. Here is where the power of foresight as narrative, as story, can begin to bring reality to life. Communities can be equipped with the tools to bring them together to have the conversations that immerse them in the construction of their future -- consciously. Something happens if you’ve crafted the story in the right way. The first move gives rise to the next trigger for change. The story becomes the driver. The positive futures narrative they have created helps to dissipate the charged fear factor that blocks our ability to problem solve and innovate as needed. The narrative they co-create help us rehearse the future. The futures narrative then serves to seed the self-confidence needed to step out in faith. It also supports the community empowerment process that is necessary to seed hope. Hope-- the currency on which you’re going to build the SMART Cities of the future.

It goes without saying that the leaders must be futures literate. The institutions also must be responsible for policy and planning and demonstrate organizational ambidexterity. ‘Organizational ambidexterity’, can be defined as an organization’s ability to be aligned and efficient in its management of today’s demands as well as being agile and adaptive to changes in the environment taking place all around, all the time. The strategic conversations on peaceable futures will need to benefit from, as well as build up, social capital and social cohesion -- which are two sides of the same coin. The third side is trust. Social capital and social cohesion are critical elements for growing peaceable futures and human-smart cities. A critical ingredient in the petri-dish for growing social capital and social cohesion is trust. Public trust in government is low. Yet we need trust for a civilized and civil society. We need to trust that the system will function and that the rule of law is going to work in your favor in order to prevent a return to the wild, wild west and the need to bear arms. Trust is vital to the construction of a robust and resilient social infrastructure. Unfortunately, these days in part because of the unforeseen consequences of AI and the way we use data, trust is breaking down even in the news. We now live with the construct of fake news. Media literacy is a skill responsible citizens must acquire. Who is telling me this news and why? The news no longer comes from the two or three trusted sources, who are arbitrators of social order and heirs and guardians of the fourth estate. Media now is in the hands of everybody who has a smartphone; and clickbait is driving the news cycle. The more salacious the headline, the more the clicks, and the more money they make, ‘KaChing!’ Therefore, twisting and turning the truth has cash value. And our trust is being chipped away. What does that mean for the social capital and cohesion, so important for the good of the whole. What then is the future of trust?

The social contract seems to be breaking if not already broken here, there and everywhere. Many if not most of the working poor and the marginalized around the world, do not believe the system works for their good. No doubt because of the failures of promises to create the rising tide that can lift all boats. Trust for many people is like the blinking Christmas light. Now you see it. Now we don’t. How can we cultivate or seed or design and build trust? Can we actually do ‘this A’ over here and achieve the impact we want on ‘that B’, over there. Or is trust something that arises as a second or third order consequence of something else? This is truly an instance where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The reality is that social cohesion is not an endpoint. It’s an ongoing process. We are always constructing it one action and reaction at a time, in each and all of our relationships. Trust does not live in the four walls of a building or in the pages of the many rule books. Trust lives in the relationships between people and organizations. Trust comes before the rule of law. A high trust society contributes to social cohesion and social capital and vice versa that make the rule of law possible.

If we were to try to define the soul of society according to the SMART framework – it would rest in five principles – Solidarity, Mutuality, Altruism, Reciprocity and Trust -- all of which are inextricably linked one to the other. These notions come from us having the consciousness of ourselves as an interdependent species. From South Africa we have brought the concept of ‘ubuntu’ into more visibility. I am because you are. Increasing social cohesion means we must get better at giving, not just taking, and receiving. This is about us caring for the soul of our communities or cities. I am not sure we have the metrics that can readily measure that. How can we measure the values systems from where we define the laws and regulations that will determine how we live in the material world? Our soul qualities inform the way we design and engineer our physical world. I believe there is power in the stories we tell ourselves and as such, we should craft stories that allow us to rehearse the futures we want. If we put ourselves – our hopes out there maybe we can learn to trust ourselves. To trust each other as peers. To trust in our leaders and especially increase inter-generational trust. Trust in the systems of government and governance. Maybe we can increase the social capital and cohesion we need to cultivate more peaceable futures. And maybe, just maybe we can move humanity up a notch on the evolutionary curve and we can say and mean ‘Peace on Earth’ and ‘Goodwill to All Humanity’. Our futures are ours to co-create. Can we trust ourselves to co-create our common good?