It’s your experience; It’s your choice

Explaining to my son that his choices are his own really forced me to sit down and articulate the concept of experience and reaction. In his world, his little sister still ‘made’ him act a certain way and it wasn’t his fault. But fast forward 20 years and I want to know I’ve raised a man that will take responsibility for his own actions; a man that can acknowledge his behaviours and his impacts on others.

Let’s face it, we are all human and we all make bad choices from time to time. These choices become part of the very fabric of our existence and we need to accept that our past choices frame our sense of identity and inform our next actions. It’s a cyclical process and like change, it’s a constant in life. There will always be a next choice to make and a next action to take.

In our physical reality we can face in to our actions and own them; we sit down with each other and talk them through. We explain our position, our frame of mind and hopefully with a bit of compassion, trust and respect, we address the situation. We apply empathy and iteratively grow our relationships through the physical connection we maintain. But how does that same thinking apply to our digital relationships?

I’m not talking about digital relationships with our partners or family, I’m talking about the digital footprint we build with companies and organisations that we trust with our personal data. How do we explain momentary lapses in judgement or phases in our life when our behaviours change because of stress or situation? As companies build their view of us through the context specific relationships we have with them, they do so without knowing what’s really going on at the other end of the device. They don’t have a full picture, and nor do we want them too, of our reality. But these digital footprints are increasing in value and becoming more complete digital profiles or digital identities. These digital identities are becoming more and more valuable for the companies that collect the data and the individuals that cause the curation of these identities.

If you ask someone in IT what identity is, you’ll likely get a response that includes ‘a user name and password’ or ‘giving the right person, the right access, at the right time’. Identity & Access Management (IAM) is about security and ensuring people only get access to things they are meant to, but there is fine line between the traditional IAM and customer data management. Customer data management is more about understanding and then analysing the data we know about customers and specific customer segments. But the two practises are still too separate for my liking.

To me, Identity should be about understanding the essence of the entity we’re trying to connect to the products and services they need. Part of that is understanding the trigger for certain choices and resulting actions before making any judgements.

Identity should be about the holistic entity and the information we come to understand about them, over time, as trust grows and as our relationship strengthens. So the ability to make judgements using that information also grows over time (credibility of the informing data). Trust in the information increases as the information becomes more layered and nuanced.

So I put it to you; can you put a time duration on how long it takes to build trust?

Identity my muse; A muse is something or someone that inspires creativity or deep contemplation. I fell head over heels in love with my muse. The intoxicating allure of deep thought and reflection, growth and change that comes when we muse.