Many organisations take credit for efficiency when, in reality, they are simply outsourcing work to the customer. Increasingly, the work we do online involves verification: proving that we are who we say we are. Technology often arrives as an option and gradually becomes an obligation. What was introduced to make life easier can end up creating more work for the very people it was supposed to serve.

I think there are certain decisions that benefit from human contact. Sometimes, we need to look someone in the eyes or, at the very least, hear their voice. There is something about human interaction that allows us to establish trust, read the situation and make a more informed judgement. As the West Indian proverb goes: “Trust grows at the speed of a coconut tree and falls at the speed of a coconut.”

There is a profound asymmetry between the time it takes to build trust and the time it takes to destroy it. Trust may be difficult to quantify, yet that does not make it any less valuable. Its benefits show up in the quality of our relationships, the decisions we make, the risks we are willing to take and the confidence we place in one another. Perhaps the challenge is that we often measure what is easy to count and overlook what makes things work. Just because trust is difficult to measure does not mean it is difficult to recognise when it is missing.