Voters must learn to trust voters again

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Trust. Given the seismic societal and geopolitical events of the last year I think it's worth reminding ourselves about Trust.

58% of eligible Americans didn't bother voting. Liberal democracies work on the assumption that the voter knows best. This is built on a basic trust. We have faith that the 'other' has our best interests at heart.

As the world has globalised, the question of who should vote on what issues arises. If you take a global perspective why should a nation vote alone on whether or not it leaves (for sake of argument) The European Union. The impact of the decision made by voters goes far beyond the impact on themselves. Do they have the right, within one nation, to vote for things that harm others?
Climate change, accords and fast-growing heavily polluting nations raise similar concerns - as does the free movement of refugees. People moving from difficulty to plenty has been the story of human expansion over the face of the Earth - until we invented passports and border controls.

Democracy it seems can only work if we share a basic beliefs/traditions/outlooks with most other of your fellow voters. When fellow voters are like us we accept the results - and I reiterate, we do so because we assume they have our interests at heart, too.

When those interests are ignored, we don't accept the results. If their experiences are far removed from my own, if they don't understand how I feel and don't care about the things I hold dear then I'm unlikely to accept the result no matter how 'conclusive'.

Is this what we have seen at play in Brexit and in the election of Donald Trump?
Or is there more that binds the people of the UK and the people of the US than divides them?

To move forward both nations must find a place where voter can trust voter again (this is more important than whether we trust politicians, for whom we all have our crap filters set to stun permanently anyway).

I do believe that trust can be rebuilt - I wrote a book (The 10 Principles of Open Business) which lays out how we can do it in brands and business and the principles are equally applicable to our institutions and way of life.

In the main we do share basic beliefs and traditions. If there are differences it is in outlook. Some see the post-globalised, digitised world through fearful eyes. Others with optimism.

If we connect more, share more, enter more transparent discourse, act ,more as what we are - partners in civil society - we can help rebuild trust. In so doing we can enable more people to identify and access the benefits of the connected world so many of us have enjoyed.

If we cannot we will break down (and self-organise ourselves) into the bubbles our Facebook timelines seem intent on generating.

Think for a moment how important trust is in winning this battle, in rebuilding the partnership we aim to have with each other in civil society -
The following are excerpts from The 10 Principles of Open Business.(Palgrave-Macmillan 2014).

"Without trust there can be no relationships of any value. Without relationships there can be no organizations, no customers, no believers, no advocates, no future. Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt went as far as to say in his 2009 University of Pennsylvania Commencement Address that: “In a networked world, trust is the most important currency.” Every politician, every newspaper editor, every CEO, every brand manager, every one of us knows it is essential. It is what ties customers to brands, families to each other, organizations and societies together. It is a very human trait and one which has given us an evolutionary advantage defined at its simplest as: “I’ll scratch your back if you’ll scratch mine.” 

Evidence from neuroscience (e.g., “The Neurobiology of Trust” by Paul J Zak in Scientific American, 2008) suggests we get chemical feel-good rushes to reward us when we trust and are trusted, and that there are large portions of the brain developed specifically to deal with its complexities. Being able to trust our neighbor allowed us to build civilizations. We’ve evolved to demand it. To work closely with people, requires it. Partnership, the paradigm of Open Business, demands it. And when trust diminishes we are in crisis.

Trust,... is a measure of the belief in the honesty, fairness, or benevolence of another party. Build this kind of reciprocal trust and your partners are more likely to forgive your failures of competence; they will cut you slack if they trust that you are trying to do your best for them and being honest when things go wrong.  

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The technology storm that threatens to blow Trump's promises away

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President Elect Donald J Trump (which is something I never imagined having to type) faces the Brexit problem. How to deliver on all the Make America Great, on-the-hoof, populist claims he made to secure the votes of a majority.

He has promised. Now he must deliver.

His problem is that he has made promises to the 'forgotten' those manually skilled, rarely college-educated, family and God loving folk who jobs have come under significant pressure from vast global economic forces which, frankly, are beyond his control.

Even if they were, he would be facing up to an even bigger challenge right now,

Consider for a moment some of the biggest technology trends reshaping our world ;

Next Generation Batteries; Most of the batteries you use apply the same principles as were discovered for making electricity hundreds (if not thousands) of years ago. New power sources will make intelligent devices more self sufficient, give commercial and long-distance reality to electric cars and transform how we consume power (with all that entails for the supply chain of fossil fuels).

They deliver high enough capacity to serve whole factories, or towns. Based on sodium, aluminium or zinc. They avoid the heavy metals and caustic chemicals used in older lead-acid designs, are cheaper, more scalable, and safer than the lithium batteries currently used.

Critically for the energy workers in the traditional industries Donald is setting out to unforget, the new batteries are much better suited to transmissions from solar or wind power. (Hint, Donald, focus here and you don't have to pollute the planet, either)

Which takes us to Autonomous Vehicles; What are all the truck drivers, taxi drivers, bus drivers, white van drivers, Donald's driver... what are they all going to do?

An Autonomous Vehicle is really just an extension of the Internet of Things. My guess is Google will do a better job of organising the information required to get us all from A to B swiftly and safely than we can individually. Choose surge pricing and perhaps you get their faster. Emergency services would get right of way and ignorant drivers failing to move to one side would no longer be an issue. Accidents down (ambulance and fire and rescue drivers) less need to police the roads (police drivers); less time stuck in traffic. More time doing what you were going somewhere to do. Less stress. What's not to like?

Unless you work as a driver.(Pilots, you should worry, too).

Then we have robotics - ready to do all those manual labour jobs the lowest paid, hardest workers have to do. If you have a house robot why do you need a Mexican maid?

And if the boss has a dozen 24/7 robots to work your warehouse, why does he need you on your forklift?

Apply AI and the threat to humans in jobs spreads quickly into blue collar jobs. Even many parts of white collar roles will be threatened - there are many parts of a lawyers work or a doctors work (such as sifting case law, or looking for patterns in patient treatments and responses) which AI can happily handle - delivering results faster.

Put these parts together and why would you ever need to go to a shop (your IoT devices would tell you when they needed upgrading, identify the best price source, place the order, a robot would make it, AI and autonomous vehicles would handle the logistics and the product would be in your home both produced and delivered as efficiently as possible with real-time processes applying machine learning to both make decisions and continuously improve.

All of that was once done by humans.

Trump's challenge, if he is to make good on his promises, is to ensure those forgotten people feel part of this revolution of the abundant. That requires a rethink of value and a restructing of what schooling is.

If he really wants to Make America Great Again he should start with the greatest skills retraining programme in history and follow up with defining what national education for a world of permanent innovation looks like.