Navigating the Trust Gap
Author: Wendy Elford Issue: 2024-07-03
Navigating the Trust Gap
by Wendy Elford
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For the longest time I’ve been interested in what is called ignorance-based learning. However, naivety is not a pretty place to live, just a reasonable place to start and a perspective to take on from time to time to keep the beginners mindset active in a massive world.
There’s such a fascinating number of options to pursue at the moment if you’ve had a fairly broad and storied career and you’ve got your eyes wide open to some of the ways in which the world is changing quickly right now.
So as a frame for this conversation, I like to keep myself in two places, two types of worlds at once. The first is the community sphere where people help each other and there is generosity, so much cherished open software and honest conversations. I treasure this honesty in dialogue with people open to self knowledge and learning. These dialogues lead to real change in peoples lives. The second place is one where people who have power of different sorts – think politicians or designers or business leaders – need to make enough sense of the world to be able to make decent decisions quickly enough. Decisions that are relevant for their business and allow them to move forward in a very fast changing world.
So for all of my sins here am I stuck in the middle between two worlds and choosing to be there. Decoding one for the other is a piece of evil that has become my specialty .Since I’ve been using the equivalent of large language models for the best part of two decades in some form another, I do have something to contribute here. After all I’ve seen and experienced from a human and personal development perspective I have come to believe that we are all just trying to hold our own. Even if we do push a little evil, even a lot of evil on each, as we do hold our own, we do need to allow each other a moment’s thought or connection to understand what ‘holding our own’ means for the other person. Which warrants another whole post entirely.
So what does that mean for me as I do legal work and design work and work with communities to build local ‘capital’? And more challenging times with people who are inside much larger entities like large corporate or governments?
The first insight really is that I need to be super clear that everything that I do means I don’t breach trust. If I’m going play with newer technology, I need to be really clear that at first I do know harm as I learn and apply what I know in the different worlds I mix in to ensure I am useful, that I provide value.
So what is today’s work? Today is a day when I work out how vulnerable I am in playing with large language models that are free to air in the open space like OpenAI, Gemini and friends. To wage a personal war of sorts between the lockdown in my own personal world that limits what leaks out from my computer and tech use, yet still be open to ways to work with outside influences and new stellar tools and ways of working. At every turn there are new challenges and threats. New tools to learn to integrate or to be deaf to.
I owe this security mindset to the people that I work with whether they are on the public benefits side in terms of community or on the for profit side. (Note to self - if you think of government is making a profit or large corporate as making a profit there is always money rolling around there somewhere in the power spectrum. Someone who always needs to have the upper hand to make their own particular world turn just another day, no matter how painful that turns out being for other people). There are in-between spaces and plenty of them between major players, but those two to three mindsets are the ones that I’m choosing to serve so that I can work out who is who in the messy middle.
And really this is going to come down to what I’m prepared to pay for, what I’m prepared not to allow for in terms of my personal energy to invest in, what I am setting up as my values. And the technical fence around my own little piece of work sitting here at my computer, Internet on or off with all of the applications I’ve chosen to use and all of the connections that I’ve made and all of the vulnerabilities that I’ve created over time by attempting to work in a very open way. A very authentic way and often a very effective way. And in trust.
In less than an hour’s time, I expect to be making a little progress here. It’s almost like going to a confessional in a church to say here are my sins. Here are the things that I should have done better. Could have done better if I had known what I know now. Help me fix up those gaps at least where the critical issues lie. Let me see what I have refused to see up to this point. I hope that it means that I can really start to get to grips with what I can honestly, hand on my heart, promise to people when their trust is the highest value that I need to place on our relationship. And to do that I need to have someone have a real critical look at how I operate.
This is going to be pretty exciting and perhaps very scary.
It’s a little bit like going in for a full health check after you’ve been ignoring lots of aspects of your health for many decades. And it needs to be done so watch this space.
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- Wendy Elford (author)
- 2024 (year)
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