Democratizing Technology

Equality among employees is about diversity, inclusion, and equal access to opportunities, including technology, to do their jobs better and to innovate. In a survey of more than 30,000 employees, we found that “innovation mindset” (an individual’s willingness and ability to be innovative at work) is six times higher in the most-equal cultures than in the least-equal ones.”²

Uneven access to technology can have a corrosive effect on morale and business performance. In many companies, we find a growing divide between teams with ready access to intelligent technologies and teams without. The latter find themselves behind the eight ball both in terms of productivity and skill development. Consider the disparities among software programmers. Some might spend 60 percent of their day performing automatable tasks. Programmers who leverage AI tools to handle those activities code faster. They also become expert at collaborating with AI systems and less prone to errors. This divide becomes critical as the market today doesn’t tolerate slow engineering delivery cycles. It demands modern engineering practices with quick build-measure-learn cycles that the technology have-nots cannot produce.

Technology democratization ensures that as many of your people as possible are empowered to become drivers of change, igniting grassroots innovation by equipping every employee with the tools and skills to build technology solutions at the point of need.

Natural language processing, low-code platforms, and robotic process automation (RPA) are just a few of the capabilities and services making technology more accessible. They each have different and unique applications, but all are putting innovative power into the hands of nonspecialists with as little friction as possible, letting people optimize their work or fix pain points on their own.

Takeda, a global biopharmaceutical leader, is empowering its people to focus on higher-value activities, supporting better patient outcomes by scaling automation throughout the company. At the time of publishing, the company has trained over 2,200 people and democratized the development of over 500 bots.³ At LexisNexis Risk Solutions, a project manager used an RPA management tool from UiPath to house and manage automation ideas, reuse bots when possible, and demonstrate ROI to leadership.⁴ In one instance, his work uncovered a backlog of records that needed to be cleared. His team used eleven robots to clear 31,000 of them in a single day. These successes have also helped evangelize RPA among other peers, scaling the automation and value creation beyond the project manager and his own team.

Technology democratization could not come at a more critical time for businesses. As companies seek to compress digital transformation into a rapid timeframe and reorient for new circumstances, they can’t afford to wait and hire someone tomorrow to build the solution they need today. In the first months of the pandemic, healthcare provider Geisinger saw a 50 percent decline in outpatient visits and a sudden surge in in-patient and ICU needs.⁵ The company faced a major challenge trying to get the right healthcare professionals to the right places at the right time. By using Quickbase low-code development they were able to build an app to help coordinate and assign the thousands of healthcare workers in their network in just two days.

With the massive shift to cloud under way, many companies for whom democratization is new territory may already have access to these tools through existing cloud solutions. Amazon’s Honeycode, for instance, is an AWS service that lets people build mobile and web apps without writing a single line of code.⁶ Salesforce’s Lightning App Builder is a point-and-click tool for creating custom pages on the Salesforce app.⁷ For the many organizations migrating their people to Microsoft Teams, Power Apps can be directly embedded.⁸ These tools, and many others, offer an opportunity to bridge the gap between complex technology and workers at every level of the organization.

When access to powerful technology spreads throughout an organization, every employee can be an active and vital part of digital transformation. People can decide for themselves what to automate, allowing them to focus on the things they do—and like doing—best. They can help to improve both the customer and the employee experience—not by gathering feedback to send to a team of tech experts for consideration, but by putting technology to work themselves.

Schneider Electric is one company demonstrating a vision of this future. The organization has made RPA a significant part of its digital transformation effort, deploying more than 220 bots as part of the process.⁹ But the company had the foresight to realize bots might create silos, break other parts of the system, or fail to meet expectations. To combat this, they established a global RPA team to review use cases submitted by business leaders and act as a backstop to ensure that the use cases are strategic and part of end-to-end transformation strategy. The group has rejected more bots than they have approved at this point, but the extra process helps to guarantee that approved bots will remain useful for a long time.

At Google, employees are able to use new technology tools—even if they aren’t yet supported by the organization—if they have a strong business need.¹⁰ This doesn’t give them free rein to use whatever whenever. Teams that adopt new tools must put in the work to support their new technical stack and must be conscious of potential issues like difficulty communicating and collaborating between teams. Google recognized the value in providing freedom to the people closest to the work in question, so rather than create policies about what technology not to use, it adopted a more inclusive framework for how workers can choose their own technical stack.

Democracy Requires Diversity

Democratization also means democratizing talent. It’s not enough to put intelligent technologies in the hands of a workforce that isn’t diverse and inclusive. Many organizations are falling short, partly because only 28 percent of the science and engineering workforce is female and only 2.5 percent is composed of Black women.¹¹ This isn’t just a problem on equity grounds: $2 trillion is at stake with US gross domestic product (GDP) alone as women exit the workplace in historic numbers. Additionally, there is an anticipated $11 trillion cost to the G20 countries over the decade if we don’t get equitable skilling right.¹²

To improve performance on diversity and gender, many companies have turned to AI, with mixed results. It was hoped that AI applications for hiring would help eliminate human biases from hiring decisions. But, as we will see in the chapter on trust, such applications often reproduced the biases of their human creators. On the other hand, AI can also be a powerful tool for eliminating biases. The intelligent text editor Textio revises job descriptions to better attract underrepresented groups. The company Atlassian leveraged Textio and increased the percentage of female recruits from 10 percent to 57 percent.¹³ Unilever used an AI-based interactive game from Pymetrics, a company we will also meet in the next chapter. The tool helped Unilever double the number of applicants hired after the final round of interviews, increase revenue by hiring higher quality employees, and up the diversity of its overall applicant pool.¹⁴

Indeed, AI-generated insights now have the power to reveal biased behavior or language in real time and correct it, while boosting equity and a company’s bottom line. Pipeline Equity is an AI-based startup that uses a data-driven analytics platform to assess, address, and take actions against the gender biases costing the United States nearly $2 trillion each year. And better yet, this technology calculates an uptick in revenue for each equity achievement located and corrected.

Another game-changing phenomenon is the move away from old models of hiring and staffing to ones that help build a skills-based economy. Walmart and Unilever are creating more equitable skilling opportunities by leveraging an AI startup called SkyHive. The technology uses quantum labor analysis to determine labor market supply and demand. SkyHive looks at declining and emerging jobs as collections of individual skills and analyzes how much these skills overlap between jobs, while highlighting the specific skills an individual needs to move from a declining role to an emerging one.¹⁵ (Full disclosure: Accenture is an investor in SkyHive and in Pipeline Equity, a startup whose SaaS platform uses AI to address the gender equity gap, and we use the services of both companies extensively.)

Before SkyHive, people self-identified, on average, eleven skills they needed to complete their jobs. Research has shown us that women and people of color are far more likely to underestimate their skills, especially in the STEM fields.¹⁶ Once the AI solution was introduced, that average number of skills jumped to thirty-four. The data also shows that a person might need to acquire only a few additional skills to switch disciplines—which wouldn’t have been possible if AI hadn’t identified the skills people didn’t realize they already had.

Making the Culture Safe for Ideas

For the democratization of technology and the democratization of talent to yield results—in innovation, in competitiveness, in a superior employee brand—leaders must create an environment that is open to new ideas from everyone, even if some ideas fail. For people to feel free to take initiative, speak up, and push the limits of the possible, they must feel psychologically safe. The notion of psychological safety among employees springs from the pioneering research of Harvard organization behavior expert Amy Edmondson, who defined it as “a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.”¹⁷ A psychologically safe and equitable environment is necessary to allow everyone to execute on and create lasting value from the abundant opportunities that humans + radically human technology offers.

After years of extensive research into the ingredients of high-performing teams, Google concluded the most significant predictor of team success was how psychologically safe people felt with their coworkers.¹⁸ Interestingly, neither co-location of teammates nor seniority drove team effectiveness. High performance can be achieved only if people feel free to open themselves up to each other for the exchange of ideas, take risks, and learn from failures.

To help establish psychological safety, companies are increasingly turning to AI and people analytics. A top-three global chemical company was facing a well-known problem: previous attempts at transformation and restructuring had led to declining trust, motivation, and engagement among employees. Using InsightScan, a people analytics platform that measures psychological safety, leadership discovered that team members were worried about negative consequences for speaking up. Based on the insights gained from the platform, leaders were coached on behaviors that would lead to more psychologically safe environments. The result? Employee engagement jumped by over 10 percent by the year’s end.

Research shows that when employees feel psychologically safe and can act fearlessly at work, productivity increases by 50 percent, turnover drops 27 percent, workers are 40 percent less likely to experience burnout, and companies become 11 times more innovative compared to their peers.¹⁹ For companies that have grasped the implications of democratization, the question is no longer just “who can I hire?” but “how can I empower?”

From Digital Literacy to Digital Fluency

Increasingly rapid technological change renders jobs and roles obsolete faster than ever. As we’ve noted, in our pre-pandemic study (encompassing more than 8,300 companies) respondents reported that in the absence of retraining their employees, 52 percent of their IT workforce’s skills, and nearly half—47 percent—of their non-IT workforce’s skills would be obsolete in three years.²⁰ In response, as we found in our second study, leaders were using experiential learning at three times the rate of laggards (73 percent versus 24 percent); leaders launched apprenticeship programs at more than double the rate of laggards (79 percent to 36 percent); and 87 percent of leaders were using AI and advanced analytics to personalize learning, predict skills needs, and match workers’ skill requirements with appropriate training versus 35 percent of laggards.²¹ The pandemic kicked training by leaders into even higher gear: 70 percent looked to aggressively increase funding on training (versus 52 percent of laggards).

From startups hoping to quickly establish themselves among more seasoned competitors to legacy organizations working to complete their digital transformations, smart companies are establishing programs that put the skills gap behind them. What was historically seen as an HR-only responsibility is now shouldered across the C-suite. CEOs feel the weight of this responsibility to reskill: 54 percent of them ranked a workforce skills shortage as the number one barrier to achieving value from digital transformation efforts.²²

At a basic level, employees need digital literacy—an elementary understanding of what technologies are at their disposal and how they work. Traditionally, companies have settled for digital literacy through traditional in-classroom or online training. But fostering basic literacy alone has resulted in uneven adoption, understanding, and utilization of digital capabilities. Moreover, the impact of the pandemic has forced a shift in demand from digital literacy to digital fluency—immersion in the language, techniques, and application of intelligent technologies. Think of it as the difference between someone who has a phrasebook understanding of a foreign language and someone who can communicate confidently with a native speaker. When the workers closest to customers, clients, or internal problems are digitally fluent, they can deliver more customized responses and offerings, with greater agility than ever.

Our firm has created what we call a Technology Quotient (TQ) program, a global learning initiative to help employees across the firm raise their “TQ” through training and competitions. We think of TQ in terms of a worker’s enthusiasm toward a technology, their competency to work with the technology, and the value they see the technology adding to their work. The program helps employees understand and articulate important technology concepts as well as their business value and applications. It covers everything from mature strategies like DevOps and cloud to more cutting-edge technologies like blockchain and AI and is built for any role or skill level. The aim is to have every employee become conversant in technology and see technology as part of the solution to the most pressing client needs.

IOOF, an Australian wealth management firm, has created a program to immerse its people in low-code development. The company wanted to explore new digital innovation opportunities but most of their highly skilled developers were busy working on a multiyear project.²³ So the company’s CIO launched a low-code competition, paired developers with less technical colleagues, and gave participants two weeks off to experiment with OutSystems, its low-code platform of choice. Already, the company says this experiment has proven valuable. Employees with outdated skills didn’t need to spend years retraining, and the low-code apps they created are fulfilling mission-critical needs. One has evolved into a full-scale production system.

A number of companies are finding that there are creative ways to give domain experts a working knowledge of AI so they can apply it in their areas of expertise. At global financial services firm Morningstar, teams of employees build miniature self-driving cars and race them against other contestants in Amazon’s DeepRacer league. The league was created by Amazon Web Services (AWS) to teach participants skills in reinforcement learning. Using Amazon SageMaker software, participants create and train algorithms to race a 1/18th scale AWS DeepRacer car around a 17 × 26-foot track. Participants compete for prizes at AWS events around the world and in virtual events and tournaments by entering time trials on special tracks in the AWS DeepRacer simulator.

“The DeepRacer League gives them the opportunity to discover reinforcement learning in a hands-on fashion and then proceed to build, train, and tune reinforcement learning models and deploy them into their autonomous model racing cars,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president, Amazon Machine Learning at the inception of the program.²⁴

Beginning in January 2019, more than 450 Morningstar equity analysts, quantitative researchers, and software developers formed nearly 100 racing teams in 10 countries. In addition to using virtual race tracks within the AWS DeepRacer simulator, teams could use physical tracks available across Morningstar offices from Chicago to Mumbai. Within months, one of the teams developed an idea for a tool based on reinforcement learning that would look for patterns in regulatory filings in order to accurately identify relevant information. Another team saw a way to use reinforcement learning to automatically find and fix broken links to the websites of financial institutions. The company expected to have dozens of such projects up and running by the end of 2020.²⁵ Says Morningstar’s chief technology officer James Rhodes, “It provides hands-on training across the company and accelerates Morningstar’s practical application of machine learning across our investing products, services, and processes.”²⁶

Digital Fluency and the Logic of the Radically Human

Achieving digital fluency requires a genuine belief in employees’ abilities and an investment to match. Nationwide Insurance announced they would spend $160 million over five years to provide “future capabilities” training for their 28,000 employees in the United States. Done right, the propagation of digital fluency throughout the organization can transform what employees—and the business as a whole—can do.

Consider Capital One. When it became an entirely innovation-driven digital company, it undertook a complementary transformation in its approach to talent and culture. Capital One sought not only to replace the technology stack, but also to inculcate digital fluency in the workforce. For instance, when the company embarked on its cloud-first strategy, it also instituted a cloud-computing training program. Capital One Tech College offers a learning program built by engineers for engineers. To ensure that everyone is cloud-fluent, online courses and in-person workshops are offered to employees—tech and nontech alike—across more than a dozen disciplines.

In 2017, the company launched Capital One Developer Academy (CODA) to create a pathway into technology for noncomputer scientists from diverse backgrounds. In the six-month, intensive training program, nontech employees learn to code by working alongside engineers. After completing the program, participants join a two-year rotational Technology Development Program as full-time software engineers. At the same time, Capital One launched separate programs in technology, analytics, and design thinking to provide opportunities for their associates to reskill and upskill themselves in roles that are outside of banking but are critical for building a multidisciplinary culture of experimentation with technology.

Meanwhile, Capital One Lab, an innovation arm that brings a startup mindset into the culture, fosters customer-centered design thinking in new processes, products, and services. Through Capital One Ventures, the bank stays abreast of innovation at startups and taps into that innovation through collaboration. Today, the bank engages in advanced technological exercise such as chaos testing, resilience, and agility—activities that have traditionally been the domain of big tech companies.

This tech-first culture, where digital fluency is a top priority, also helps attract top talent. “Talented software engineers want to work where they see other great software engineers,” says CIO Rob Alexander. “They want to work with modern technologies, and they do not want to work on legacy applications platforms, or slow bureaucratic ways of working, which are often the case that you might find in large banking or other large institutions. We took on those two challenges, which is how do we build a team, a critical mass of great software engineers that will attract others, and change our technology operating model in a way that allows us to evolve like the best technology companies.”²⁷

Not surprisingly, Capital One has consistently ranked as one of the best places to work.²⁸ Without the company’s thriving development and training programs, and the push for experimentation and working across business units, it’s likely that, paradoxically, technology alone would not have transformed the bank into a technology company. That is the logic of the radically human. It’s also a lesson in how to genuinely differentiate an organization on the dimension of talent in an age of radically human technology.

Productivity Anywhere

The year 2020 saw the biggest workforce and workplace transformation in living memory. To keep employees safe during the pandemic, companies allowed legions of their people to work from home. To keep the business functioning and employees productive, companies doubled down on technology solutions. Almost overnight, billions of people around the world changed their mode of working. As of 2019, only 5.4 percent of employees in the twenty-seven member countries of the EU usually worked from home—a share that had remained roughly constant for a decade. At the outbreak of the pandemic, the figure jumped to 40 percent.²⁹ Research conducted by Stanford University in May 2020 found nearly twice as many people, in the United States alone, working from home than working on-site—accounting for more than two-thirds of economic activity.³⁰

Initially, many companies regarded this massive shift as a short-term solution to a temporary problem. But employees soon came to like working at home. Consider Fujitsu.³¹ Just prior to the onset of the pandemic, 74 percent of the company’s workers indicated in a survey that they thought the office was the best place to work. By March, 80,000 of the company’s Japan-based workers were working from home; in May, only 15 percent of Fujitsu employees preferred the office.

Nearly one year after the Stanford study, 90 percent of office workers in midtown and lower Manhattan, the two largest central business districts in the United States, were continuing to work remotely.³² Another national survey of commercial landlords conducted at the same time by a real-estate technology platform found that only 18 percent of respondents envisioned a return to the traditional five-days-a-week, on-site model of work.³³ Meanwhile, the appearance of the more contagious Delta variant of the Covid virus prolonged the necessity of remote work. Many companies in the tech, finance, and media sectors have indicated that they will continue to have employees work remotely some or all of the time, but so have companies like Novartis, Ford, and Siemens.³⁴

While many workers enjoy the freedom of remote working, research shows that finding the optimal balance between what works well on site and what works well remotely is what people really want. They want the environment that’s best suited for them. For some, that means going back to the office; for some, it means going 100 percent remote; still others prefer a mix.

When people can work from anywhere, they can do their jobs in different or even brand-new ways that will outlast the pandemic. For instance, at the University of Liverpool, scientists worked with a robot chemist to continue their research during lockdowns.³⁵ The robot found ways to speed up reactions inside solar cells and could run experiments autonomously, even when no one was present. The researchers won’t stop using these robots just because they can go back into the lab themselves. They’ll expand what they can do, like running experiments 24/7 or having robots handle toxic substances.

Businesses must accommodate rather than fight this new reality. They need to toss out convention and reimagine how their workforce model can best support and enable their people to be more productive—how remote employees and on-premises employees collaborate, what work is better done in which locations, and what the purpose of physical offices will become.

To be effective, people need a sense of autonomy. Back in the 1970s, work psychologists discovered that giving people a sense of autonomy in their work tasks resulted in higher levels of responsibility and performance. Less control ultimately generates more value. Fujitsu’s new “Work Life Shift” program seeks to maximize creativity and efficiency by letting the company’s workers determine the best work situation for themselves.³⁶ All employees will be able to work from home permanently and to work flexible hours. But while Fujitsu is halving its total office space in Japan, the company is actually expanding satellite offices in different parts of the country. The new model will give employees the freedom to choose where they want to work—whether that’s their home or one of these smaller offices.

Companies must also change the way they manage and evaluate employees. Even though research has definitively shown that the most productive people take breaks to achieve higher levels of performance, many work cultures are built upon a “busyness” mindset.³⁷ But in productivity-anywhere workforces, it’s no longer about staying busy and visible, but about delivering valuable outcomes.

Consider one global biotechnology company. With a flexible approach to how, where, and when work happens, the company created an outcomes-focused culture to allow people more freedom in how they achieve results. A digital worker toolkit centered on a collaborative platform enabled asynchronous communication to flow more easily. Behavioral nudges drove better meeting etiquette and empowered employees to manage their time. The result: the company has successfully shifted away from a “presenteeism” culture, where meetings are the primary way for employees to demonstrate their value. The pressure to always be “on” has lessened, thanks to increased trust and flexibility. The solution prioritizes results, supports collaboration, enables flexibility across teams, and draws the boundaries people need to take breaks, allowing for meaningful connection and reflection throughout the day. It’s no surprise that higher company performance followed.

Platform technologies such as Microsoft Viva are making a focus on outcomes even more accessible to companies today. The AI-powered platform helps create a centralized experience regardless of where people work. A digital system of shared understanding and connection is made visible on the platform to ensure people are in sync about what others are doing, get access to valuable knowledge in real time, and gain insights into why they are doing certain things.

With more people working from home, Humana, a leading healthcare company, used the Microsoft Viva employee experience platform to help transition its 26,000 employees at speed.³⁸ Humana uses Viva insights “to help the company gain privacy-protected insights into work patterns, collaboration overload, manager effectiveness, and organizational resiliency.” These insights empower Humana to work smarter and help balance productivity and well-being in a hybrid model.

Productivity anywhere also lets companies rethink how they recruit new employees. Almost every major company already runs its business globally but still sees itself tied to geographies. Opening up to the idea of geographically distributed employees will finally give companies access to a truly global and genuinely diverse talent pool. And it will give employees the freedom to live anywhere they wish and avoid having to uproot their families to pursue work opportunities. Facebook, for example, is transitioning more of its workforce to remote work as a way to expand and diversify its talent pool. Mark Zuckerberg has cited this newfound ability to recruit people from more locations and the ability to retain people who might leave the company because they want to move to a different area.³⁹

Companies must also manage the potential disconnect between in-person and remote workers. Workers in different roles will benefit from the best work environment for their particular needs, but without careful implementation, in-office and remote workers could struggle to collaborate, become demoralized, or feel unsupported. Quora, for instance, is adopting a remote-first approach while also keeping its California headquarters open as a co-working space. To avoid distant workers’ voices being minimized in favor of those in physical office spaces, all employees attending meetings will be required to appear on their own video screen.⁴⁰

Organizations are also addressing the tricky new question of how to ingrain their mission and values into new hires who have never experienced the in-person work environment. Verizon, which transitioned 90 percent of its workforce to a work-from-home model in mid-March 2020, was hiring for 950 new home-based customer service roles.⁴¹ Leaning on its experience transitioning existing workers to a remote model at the beginning of the pandemic, the company has redesigned its new hire training programs to be digital, self-guided, and video-based and to include work-from-home-specific training as well as training from current employees.

Twitter, which was among the first major organizations to announce permanent remote work, is transforming its workforce culture in even more ways.⁴² While remote working will help the company meet its goal to hire more diverse employees from all parts of the United States, leaders have also identified areas where improvement is needed. To avoid meeting fatigue, executives formally cut down on video calls. They have also decided to rethink their performance review system to prevent bias against remote workers, and they are looking for ways to recreate “water cooler” connections and social engagement.

The benefits of productivity anywhere to your operations and your employer brand are many: truly global access to diverse talent; having a workforce that’s constantly “on” by virtue of coverage across time zones; resilience against future disruptions; even delivering on sustainability goals by right-sizing company office spaces and cutting down on polluting, energy-consuming employee commutes. Most importantly, embracing productivity anywhere is an opportunity to reimagine what you do and what you can offer to the employees who help you deliver it—to turn human resources into radically human resources—differentiating your company from those still engaged in the old-fashioned war for talent.

The concrete business benefits of productivity-anywhere workforces are well documented. Accenture research has found that 63 percent of high-growth organizations have enabled productivity-anywhere workforces. On the flip side, 69 percent of organizations with negative or no-growth projections are still focused on where people should work—favoring either completely on site or remote workforce models. And 85 percent of people who feel they can be productive anywhere also plan to work for their current organization for a long time.⁴³

Getting Started

Capitalizing on humans + radically human technologies to differentiate your organization on the dimension of talent is a moving target. Best practices are still evolving. But one thing is certain: waiting to act isn’t an option. You will need to constantly experiment with new solutions, thinking beyond traditional HR categories and taking some concrete steps to democratize technology, build a digitally fluent culture, and achieve productivity anywhere.

To begin democratizing technology, evaluate your existing access to technology. Identify what tools you may already have access to, or what additional investments need to be made, to power grassroots innovation. Then pick one area of the enterprise and experiment. For instance, give sales development representatives the tools needed to design their own apps or customer service agents the ability to automate workflows.

To democratize talent, use the career-enhancing promise of democratized technology and the flexibility of productivity anywhere to create a powerfully differentiated employer brand that attracts diverse employees. Leverage both the power of debiased hiring technology to help ensure genuine diversity and create psychological safety to maintain it and reap its benefits in innovation.

To fully harness the powerful logic of radically human technology—that it is humans who confer technological leadership—invest in digital fluency programs across your organization. Immerse employees in available technologies. Teach them how to use those technologies to design solutions at the point of need.

For the dawning age of productivity anywhere, identify where you have made rapid, pandemic-driven digital transformations; address any security concerns; and consider how you can make hybrid models seamless and sustainable. Remember, you are undertaking one of the most massive workforce experiments since the dawn of the industrial era. Evaluate how it’s going. Invest in workplace analytics tools, and develop a set of key performance indicators to gain a deeper understanding of how employees are responding to remote work.

Reimagine how your company’s physical space is utilized. Plan for optimizing offices to account for a growing remote contingent, and imagine how the enterprise can transform those spaces. You should also explore creating capabilities and environments that foster immersive digital collaboration and unite on-site and at-home employees in shared experiences, ensuring that the informal advantages of workplaces are virtualized as well.

What technology democratization, digital fluency training, and productivity anywhere have in common is a deep trust in the radically human possibilities of employees. The issue of trust has never been more prominent for individuals or so problematical for organizations. Trust is not only the invisible motor of commerce, but also the basis of our most radically human instincts, determining how we respond to everything from other individuals to enterprises large and small. As we will see in the next chapter, how your company and your technology embody and interact with this most fundamental of human responses will play a large part in your ability to compete.