 Trust is the way forward. Yep, I said, trust is the way to get out of the multiple messes we're in. No, I'm not blind. In fact, I live in Portland in the northwest corner of the United States. Today, as you might have heard, Portland is apparently a hornet's nest of anarchists bent on destroying the city, then lighting fire to the rest of the country. Except it's not. Despite Oregon's complicated history of white suprematism, Portland today is a haven for people who would like more trust between neighbors, more social justice, and a planet that's still hospitable for human life in a hundred years. Maybe even a planet that would welcome human life. My wife and I live less than two kilometers from the epicenter of the recent protests, and I can report that the rest of Portland is as it ever was, other than closed businesses because of the pandemic. If there is a meltdown here in Portland, it'll be because there is a much broader calamity when the US is stumbling toward right now. Let's examine that calamity in progress. Anan Giridharadas is also speaking here at Unfinished. I agree with him a lot, so I'd like to weave my thoughts around his. Per a recent tweet of his, we are living through five hot crises. A global pandemic which precipitated cascading economic crises that aren't done cascading, protests for social justice triggered mid-pandemic by unaddressed racism, existential threats to democracy fueled by a president who appears to want our norms and institutions shattered, all making us unable to deal with existential threats from the planetary crisis that we created. And the US will shortly hold a pivotal election, which has massive implications for democracy here and worldwide. You kind of have to pause and marvel. I wouldn't want to be a scriptwriter for House of Cards or a new horror thriller right now because in so many ways real life has become stranger than fiction. We've all fallen inside the ultimate reality TV show. Now, you can look at all of these crises as proof that trust is permanently broken or even as signs of a coming apocalypse, or you can flip your perspective around and look at the crises as opportunities to rescue and repair trust and fix the underlying problems now very painfully visible once and for all. Clearly, that's the side I'm on. I first saw the underbelly of trust almost three decades ago when I read great critiques of the compulsory educational system, reflected on my experiences in it, and realized how little it trusts kids. With compulsory education, kids' time is programmed. They need hall passes and permission slips to go anywhere. Their reading is restricted. They can't even fidget much. Curious about math during French class? Troublemaker. They can trouble for being kids, which is honestly just so sad. All of this mistrust creates scarcities and dysfunctions that we later try to fix. We want young adults to have initiative, curiosity, and a sense of agency, all things they're born with, but school structures do a great job of stamping those out. In other words, we kill the very qualities we want them to have. Mistrust is very destructive. And when we turn to politics, the stakes are higher than usual now. Political solutions that rebuild trust won't come from the usual basket of tactics, tax cuts or hikes, more pay for workers and teachers, reinstating broken treaties, jobs programs. As Anand puts it in the rest of that tweet I mentioned, milk toast, and I had to look it up, in the 1920s cartoon character Caspar Milk Toast was the icon of timidity. Milk toast won't feed America's hunger. Our problems run much deeper. Fixing the problems would be much easier if we could govern together. Unfortunately, except maybe for New Zealand, governing is in crisis. See existential threats to democracy, the fourth crisis I mentioned earlier. These are hot topics in America right now, but the US is not special in this regard. We are just one of many countries that have swung sharply to the far right over the past decade, including the Philippines, Brazil, Turkey, Poland, India, and Hungary. Others are now tipping toward authoritarian populism, the flavor of populism that's on the rise because Occupy was also populist, an illiberal democracy where people still vote, there is a judiciary and a press, but they are all captive to the rulers. It's all a facade. This bodes poorly for peace and collaboration. Those sharp turns toward populism in the far right were possible because the social contract has been broken all around the world for some time. You may remember the Occupy movement, the Arab Spring, Tiananmen, or the US Tea Party. More recent movements include school strikes for climate led by Greta Thunberg, extinction rebellion in the UK, the umbrella movement in Hong Kong, never again for gun control after those school shootings in the US, Me Too, and Black Lives Matter. These are all protests to fix the social contract. Citizens around the world have been trying hard to rid themselves of corruption and inequality and intolerance and fix their systems with very limited success. Now, citizens are pissed enough that they're willing to risk wrecking the system and their succeeding. One of the far right's tools is the intentional undermining of trust, not just trust in science, government, and journalism, which are all under siege, also trust in one another, more specifically in the other. Othering makes it very hard to agree on anything. I call this stage of our path through history meltdown, and we've already gone from lockdown to meltdown, and there's more. In 2016, the BBC documentarian Adam Curtis convinced me that we are already in a non-linear war. A war in which disinformation and confusion can win more territory than bombs and bullets. He describes non-linear warfare in his documentary Hyper-Normalization. I highly recommend watching it. If you're worried about the trustworthiness of every tweet and Facebook post you share, as well as the news stories you read, you're experiencing non-linear warfare right now. Yet our situation resists repair, as Anand has described in Winners Take All and Elsewhere, earnest people who appear to be trying to fix these problems often unintentionally perpetuate them. The system is rigged to perpetuate itself. Appearing to help is itself a business model and a virtuous lifestyle. Corporations, meanwhile, are mostly stuck or frozen in the middle of the road trying to avoid politics, but discovering that capitalism is political, very political. Many companies are struggling with the notion that profit maximization, GDP growth, and free markets might actually be hurting humanity. A few companies are out ahead of this wave, but on opposite sides. Some are decarbonizing, taking stands on social justice and improving equity. Others were instrumental in causing our current messes through predatory practices, regulatory capture, successful lobbying for deregulation, and surveillance capitalism. Another book I recommend by Shoshana Zuboff. I'm really struck by the timing of this unfinished conference. We're in a fluid, liminal, in-between state. We and the world are so unfinished. Things could tip either way, more toward apocalypse or more toward utopia. I'm a realist. Neither extreme will happen in its pure form, but the directional difference is huge. And because I believe trust is the way forward, I also believe trust is the lever that can move us toward utopia. So what does trust look like going forward? When I first started down this path 25 years ago, I didn't think that my greatest insights about trust would come from Quaker meeting, or unschooling, or Wikipedia, or barely structured events, or workplace democracy, or microfinance, or dozens of other seemingly disconnected domains. But they did. The foundational insight all these domains offered was, assume good intent. This is a common rule of thumb in the open source community. It just means start from trust. If you get a message that looks strange or offensive, give it the benefit of the doubt. If it is indeed intentionally offensive, then figure out why. Inquire within. Change the setting. In normal times that would mean inviting them to a cup of coffee so you can talk. Maybe now it means taking your Zoom call outside. Assume good intent does not mean trust blindly or naively. There are definitely bad actors in the world. The problem is that assuming everyone is a bad actor is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You end up with many worse interactions than assuming good intent. Assume good intent from trust is starting from strength, not weakness. For example, there's a big difference between being defenseless and being undefended. When you're defenseless, you're simply vulnerable. When you drop your defenses intentionally, it's an opening gesture of trust, but you're still safe. Okay, so after assuming good intent, then what? Next comes listen deeply. Deep listening means sitting down to talk. I'd love it if the anti-fascists on the far left and the boogaloo boys of the alt-right would sit together to talk. More likely, some democratic socialists and evangelical pastors can share stories over a beer. Two of my inspirations on bridging the cultural divide are Darrell Davis and Dia Khan. Davis, a black jazz pianist, has a collection of over 200 Ku Klux Klan robes in his garage. Given to him by Klan members, he helped retire out, meaning he helped them voluntarily quit the KKK by listening to them with respect. His simple questions still echoes in my head. How can you hate me if you don't even know me? Dia Khan is a Pakistani human rights activist and documentarian. She has interviewed white supremacists and neo-Nazis in their homes, clubhouses, and shooting ranges. In her 2017 documentary, White Right, you can see the moments where her interviewees realize how vulnerable she is on their turf. You can also see as they begin to build friendships out of these interactions. But it's not just people and organizations like the KKK that we need to listen deeply to. It's your neighbor with the long signs you don't like. It's the relative you avoid talking to at family get-togethers. We've been in an epidemic of not listening, amplified by social media and partisan politics. Free speech has been weaponized. The tolerant are being intolerant. We need to find a way to listen deeply to one another again. Listening is hard. Screwing it up has consequences. As Anand says in his letter to all who have lost in this era, I heard you, but I did not listen. We must not just hear, we must listen deeply. Building trust through deep listening requires vulnerability, which takes courage. Here we can draw on the work of Brene Brown, the Houston psychologist, who has helped us realize that vulnerability is an asset, not a liability. To quote Anand again, democracy is not a supermarket. But we've done exactly that. We've replaced citizenship, which involves responsibility and cooperation, with a consumer mass market experience you can pop in and out of. Instead, Anand says, democracy is a farm where you reap what you sow. My own trip to trust began back in the 1990s when I realized I was allergic to the word consumer. Later, after much pondering, I realized that we had quietly consumerized almost all aspects of human life. This goes far beyond consumer goods like breakfast cereals or cars. We've consumerized education, health care, entertainment, and yes, even elections and governance. Why do political candidates ask for contributions all the time? Where does that money go? Most of it goes to media, to advertising. In that setting, you're a consumer of government, not a citizen. By the way, we did that. We consumerized governance long before Trump won his first nomination. I'll point here again to Adam Curtis and another documentary he did back in 2002. It's called The Century of the Self. It's an amazing analysis of how psychology was applied in the middle of the last century first in business to make us buy more stuff than in politics to sway our votes. Watch it and you'll never think of politics or the word consumer in the same way again. So back to our key question today. Trust is the way forward? Really? This trust path sounds difficult. It takes time and patience and it's not guaranteed. It can be risky. To misquote the playwright Oscar Wilde, the trouble with real governance is that it takes too many evenings. But honestly, the other paths forward suck. Let's talk through some of them. Path one is what I'll call continue along the status quo. This is where we're headed, if we do nothing. And I'm convinced it's not pretty. As we fight for power across the cultural and political divides, our ability to make smart decisions breaks in the process. At the same time that economies collapse and the systems that sustain life on the planet collapse too. Even wealthy people shouldn't want that outcome. Path two, everything's fine. The new optimists like Hans Rosling, Stephen Pinker, Johann Nordberg and even Bill Gates, yes, mostly white men, point to favorable trends in poverty, nutrition and diseases. We're so much better off now, aren't we? Not so fast. Just look around. Yes, we have higher life expectancies and better access to technology, but how helpful will those be if we can no longer inhabit many parts of the Earth or our food supply breaks? Path three, science will fix this. Techno utopians are convinced that just as technology got us into these messes, so too it can get us out. One theorist would have a sprinkle iron filings into the oceans to be eaten by plankton to catalyze carbon absorption. Their experiments didn't prove that effect. Another theory says we'll reflect more sunlight from the Earth by spraying aerosols in the atmosphere, slowing the pace of warming. And for years, many have said that we'll get to retire in comfort as robots do all the work and grow all the food. Maybe some of these things will work, but will they be accessible to most of the world's 8.8 billion people? Unlikely. And we're falling further behind our climate goals every day while at the same time we're seeing ever more technologies that spy on us, entertain us to death, or just try to make us forget the mess we're in. And last but not least, there's path four. We must get off this rock. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and many others are convinced that we have to colonize other planets. Some believe it is human destiny. Others, more cynically, see that we're busy destroying this planet so we'd better build a backup system to assure mankind's survival. The cynical me thinks I've read enough great sci-fi to realize you don't want to be on the first thousand spaceships sent to colonize other rocks, especially if we don't fix trust first. The simpler human me thinks, shouldn't we give fixing our planet our best effort? Which, of course, brings me back to trust, the theme of this year's Unfinished. Allow me to pitch some of the benefits of trust. Trust is cheaper than control. Pretend you'd like to buy a new home entertainment system. Who among your friends would you ask for advice? Your tech-savvy friend Christina, right? You trust her judgment? How much would that advice cost? Now compare that to the marketing and advertising budgets of the major home entertainment vendors. Trust is cheaper, right? Trust also builds community. Collaboration builds relationships. Solving something together brings you closer. Not always, of course, but more often than not. And my favorite effect, because it's unexpected, is that trust releases the genius that's in the room already. When we make everyone stay in their own lane, when we get trapped and often end up miserable, making sure that Sue in design stays within her job description cuts away the possibility that she's amazing at logistics or financial planning, or that design could improve those functions. Trusting people more deeply, whether they're children, employees, constituents, or clients, lets people find their own way to the place where they can add the most value. Drawing on these ideas, I've created a process called design from trust that can help us reverse the mistrust that has been baked into most of our systems and institutions. So many things need this kind of redesign. A fantastic starting point would be politics and governance. But remember, our improvements have to happen while we're in a nonlinear war with parties taking active measures to destroy discourse and keep us on the present course. And our major communication platforms, both social media and traditional media, are all driven by algorithms that pay off when our attention is spun in the wrong directions. So we have our work cut out for us. And as you head into the rest of Unfinished, let me leave you with one question. If trust is the way forward, what's the next step you can take on that path?