Elevating the Human Experience

Chapter 14Tools to Elevate the Human Experience: Values, Emotions, and Trust

The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.

—Ernest Hemingway

As we began to make progress and grow in confidence on the journey of elevating the human experience for the people inside our company, we asked ourselves what it would mean to live up to the aspiration externally with the humans we called clients. We were super passionate, but would we ever get comfortable talking about elevating the human experience with people outside our four walls? Would they think we were crazy? What might it look like to go beyond the current discourse of a customer experience transaction or a workforce experience and introduce more vulnerability into the way we worked? We realized that if we were going to elevate the experience of being human, even humans we would never meet, we would need different tools and different insights into human behavior than what already is in use in the workplace. We began by researching three topics we believe are central to the experience of being human: our deeply held values, our emotions, and how and why we build or lose trust in each other and in the institutions that make up our communities (see the figure here).

We decided to focus on values because we know that while our behaviors can change based on the situation presented to us, our values change ...