Tribes and trust

Published on May 30, 2021   26 min

Other Talks in the Series: Future Work Now

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0:00
Hi, my name's Julian Stodd. I'm a researcher and author, as well as the Captain of Sea Salt Learning, a consultancy that works with organisations around the world to help them understand the context of the social age. And it's one part of that social age that I'm going to talk to you about today in this session on Tribes and Trust. A chance to think about the way that we come together, and the social forces that hold us together, and how trust works.
0:34
As we start this exploration, I just want to start by talking to you about curiosity. And I'm doing this because I was talking to my nephew recently and he said to me, "Well, what is curiosity?" In the way that children do. They ask a question that's very simple but takes you a bit of hard thought to think about. And I said to him, "Well, if you look around you and if you are standing on a hill, and you look around and you see the hills and the valleys and the forests and rivers, that landscape that is familiar, that's not what curiosity is. Curiosity is kind of the view over the horizon. It's what lies beyond the forest. What lies behind the mountain. It's not the landscape we already know, but it is sort of connected to it in some way. It's beyond the known, but it's not entirely abstract from it.". And when I think about trust, I tend to bring that mindset with it, because of course, all of us know what trust means. We are all high-functioning social creatures. We understand how trust works. Maybe we've mastered it through a whole succession of failed teenage romances and friendships and the stumbling and tripping that we do as we figure this stuff out. But in general, we're pretty expert at it. But when you research what trust means, what you discover is the very thing that we say we are experts in, maybe unique to ourselves. We may not share exactly the same view of what trust is or indeed how it works, so as we make this journey today, I'd encourage you to unlock or awaken your own curiosity, not to think about the thing that you are sure about, but take a chance to think about trust in some different ways. To come with me as we walk outside that landscape and into a new area.