POST-SCRIPT
By Nirmitee Shah, Global Head of Aladdin Client Experience
It’s changing so much, and so quickly, that the things that used to fit into really neat boxes—home life, work life, consumer expectations, ways of doing business—just don’t fit anymore.
And today, there is a ton of ambiguity; the lines around those boxes have blurred. This blurring naturally creates feelings of both pessimism and optimism. (And of course, there are matrixed opportunities and considerations on either side of the spectrum.)
But whichever lens you choose, there are a few empirical elements that are central to the modern-day experience: information is ubiquitous and accessible in never-before-seen ways, expectations are continuing to evolve with the rise of consumer influence on business technologies, and because of that influence—every day we are challenged to interact with the world around us in new ways.
How—might you ask—does one find a way forward when machines have the potential to underwrite (or re-underwrite) experience or when even something as simple as a handshake has been called into question because of a global pandemic? Where does trust fit in?
Interestingly enough (in tech-speak), a handshake is the signal shared between a set of devices that authenticates and validates information sharing. Just as with people, it’s an example of trust. And that trust is inherently based on stability—of a network connection to path data, of an authorization to do more. The handshake is defined by its stable-ness.
Handshakes have been a staple in business for the same reason. A single shake could move markets, change fortunes, or crumble destinies (often backed by the star-power of the person behind the hand). This required both parties to be in the same space (at the same time) together. And as we look ahead, we should consider that even those handshakes could be augmented by enhanced digital connections that were wholly unthinkable decades ago.
Earlier in this compendium, my colleagues, Diwakar Goel and David Woodhead, predicted that in the future communities will be built around data. I think, too, that business will (in the not-too-distant future) be ever-more built around trust—one defined by a lattice work of stability made up of many nodes, motions, and people consistently demonstrating trust through stability—not contingent on a single handshake.
Thusly, the way forward will hinge on myriad, connected communities of business partners, where trust is a throughline across entire organizations, rather than just reliant on the connection between two individuals. That, indeed, will be a novel experience; one we can all benefit from.
We could call it systematized trust.
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