Mlakar's passion is vivid. She is full of insights for the 21st century economy. Her moto is "Perceive. Awaken." At the EAPM Congress 2019 in Bled she will, among others, address the question of trust, which is essential to HR and the future of all of us.

Evolving form a geocentric to an anthropocentric economy, contemporary HR deals with many subtle issues. It seems trust is a new currency, prevailing among others, non-material and intangible ones. Is trust something we control, manipulate or create? Yes and no. Inside our mental constituents we have installed during our childhood years, trust in ontological safety was prevailing self-evident value, hopefully almost never questioned. Believing things are fine, trusting that sun will rise each morning, parents will create solutions to the many challenges life brings, we co-created beautiful, peaceful and harmonious idea of life that seemed obvious and overwhelming. When due to obvious or less obvious reasons trust is broken, inner safety is lost. While the inner safety lack turns out to be a wide institutional problem, bringing our consumption appetites to minimum, which poses a great risk to international economy, we invented solutions. We see from here trust can easily become a new target, a new currency and value for money. Thus, we have created and used institutions for yielding trust alongside laws and other official manners of agreement. Since we know how hard it is when we suffer inside and out, we are trying to prevent pain we experience when we lose trust.

When trust is questioned?

Is trust a license never questioned? Of course not. Life can be a struggle or a bubble. It seems we need to trust in order to act as creative humans; and on the contrary, if we need to take care of essential needs, like water, food and primary safety, we only struggle. Without the currency of trust, we cannot live as humans of high cognitive, emotional, and intellectual potentials, waiting to be revealed in harmonious environments where struggle is embedded only in job problem solving while result of it is never life threatening.

Maybe we have forgotten to question what is trustworthy and whom we should trust and why? Is it possible the future we are headed towards is going to be full of trust? Is it possible that in the era of new social media and virtual reality business and life trust is rising and not diminishing? Often we see that technology, like Airbnb, supports trust among strangers, relying only on inner feeling everything is going to be ok. Of course, they have a choice to trust in platform and brands as well as in inner faith of overall goodness of people. It seems we trust in the good of humanity, which might explain higher trust in strangers and lower trust in institutions, like governments and alike. What we are facing nowadays is a transformation of trust all over the globe. Companies, entrepreneurs and workers can use technology to accelerate trust in humankind, where classical borders are just a memory, where coalition of ambassadors of life and good will be placed at the forefront. "The Internet of things", smart cities and biotechnology, to mention just a few, will replace trust in something usual, standard and obvious. HR will change inside and out. We might be awaiting an era that will enable us to open up to our full potential, the foundations of which might have been shaped and put in place by Apple and Microsoft almost four decades ago.

Future scenario

New agendas brought by technological and productive development, seeking new challenges where ontological safety is no longer accompanying value, are more and more apparent every day. If trust is something we consciously and subconsciously share, we have a go. If we control earth and seeking to control the sky, values like new synergy, economy of insight and humans as trustworthy are not just fairy tales of wishful thinking. Anthropocentrism [the idea that humans are central to existential questions], ruining core values amongst others faith in goodness, can be overcome by a leap of trust.

We need to make a leap into human divine nature and elusive concepts of freedom, waiting for us to harness and, in this way, experience the best of humankind. Maybe digital age and new biotechnology can assist our ambiguous nature? While ethical dilemmas are prevailing in all domains of our lives, digital age is addressing and questioning each step we make. If concepts and ideas are not installed and if the possible reality is not created, in the social media world, it does not exist. And we create misfortunes, doubts, negative visons and projections of the future. 

Who is delivering hope for humanity? Who is invictus seeing bright future and being aware of our potential power and hidden abilities we can harness in order to co-create the future we will all enjoy and share? Whatever we do, however we act or react, we do it because somewhere deep down we trust that life is fair. Trust the good of the world. Trust the best versions of us, when we meet and work together. The resulting digital age is a possible reward for us all, despite the supposed side-effect of diminishing social skills currently facing. We need to discern whether our trust is placed in worthy men and along the way observe and assess if the authenticity of fellow men and women is aligned with the values trustworthiness is defined by.