Editor’s letter: Where does authority come from today?


The introductory essay to our special content series on Authority.

By Millie Arora and Morgan Ramsey-Elliot


Information has never been so abundant or easy to access, and yet, knowledge feels increasingly scarce. As trust in experts, institutions and traditional arbiters of power has eroded, what’s true, reliable or right is more contested than ever, even as new AI tools promise to make both the access to and absorption of information simpler. 

Against this uncertainty, people are increasingly turning to more alternative, personalised and makeshift sources of authority to seek out answers: whether that’s checking Reddit before calling a doctor to self-diagnose an illness or consulting a TikTok finfluencer for investment advice rather than a financial advisor. Across our work, our cultures and larger societies, we see individuals increasingly eschewing accepted orthodoxies, choosing instead to trust their own sense of what’s right and true for them.

At the same time, this is pushing up against a powerful countervailing force that has been building for years: the supposedly objective truth represented in numbers. Inside organisations, decisions must be ‘data-driven’ and in some cases, solely made on the basis of (and in the service of) moving metrics, while at an everyday level, we are seeing people increasingly making decisions based on behavioural metrics. Despite all of this focus on measuring everything, however, we are failing to capture complex but important metrics such as internal states and moods, cultural health, and IRL community strength.

It’s about context, not just content

“A large part of the decline in trust in the last decade is this idea of post-truthiness. And coming to the realisation that people’s truth is, in certain contexts, subjective. In the same sense, I think authority is also often subjective – even in terms of what you consider good authority or authority that you trust.”

- Lore Oxford

The question of who or what holds authority today can no longer be answered through purely objective measures. Whereas previously authority was granted implicitly by one’s title, status or the institution to which they belonged, authority today has become much more subjective and malleable; it has become relational rather than absolute. 

As cultural theorist Lore Oxford said in our On Good Authority interview series, “A large part of the decline in trust in the last decade is this idea of post-truthiness. And coming to the realisation that people’s truth is, in certain contexts, subjective. In the same sense, I think authority is also often subjective – even in terms of what you consider good authority or authority that you trust.” There is perhaps no better illustration of this than the recent US election, which proved that the orthodoxies from which leaders and institutions once derived their authority, can no longer be relied upon.

Authority figures can no longer be disentangled from their audiences; it’s in this interplay that authority is established, as much based on the eye of the beholder as it is the credibility of the messenger. This transformation reflects a broader cultural shift: we increasingly filter information through the lens of personal experience and community values. When someone speaks, we don’t just hear their words – we see their position in our social networks, their lived experiences, and how they relate to our own stories.


Where should we be looking?

We are seeing new drivers of authority emerge out of this shifting landscape: credible personal experience, over abstract or academic information; contextualised data, over simple measures; relatability in how the message is communicated, not just what the message is; and who (or what) you co-create the message with.

We see these emergent sources of authority playing out through four interconnected dimensions:

Authorship and authenticity:
As genAI rapidly changes our creative marketplaces, who is really in control?


Numbers and metrics:
In our age of hyper-quantification, what metrics should we pay attention to?


Systems and spaces:
In building our future spaces and communities, what ideas and principles should guide our decision-making?


Leadership and credibility:
To build knowledge and expertise, who and what are people turning to?


Understanding the new dynamics of authority and to whom and what people are turning to in the face of uncertainty and change is vital for companies and organisations; getting this right has the power to make or break big strategic choices from the introduction of new technologies to implementing successful organisational and cultural initiatives to developing sales and marketing models with edge and resonance.

Authorship and authenticity 

As genAI rapidly changes our creative marketplaces, who is really in control?

In the wake of rapid advances in genAI that challenge traditional notions of authorship, we see a new authority granted by who (or what) you co-create with. In the art world, for example, many are handwringing about genAI’s impact on the traditional authorship of artists and creators. However, in the same way that early photographers in the 19th century were embroiled in philosophical debates over photography’s impact on subjects’ personhood and identity, so too are creatives grappling with what it means to create authentic work, which we discuss in our ReD Dialogue: Authorship in the age of AI.  

“[Leaders] need to have a perspective, yes, and it will only cut through if the messaging resonates with what people are looking for in a way that they understand.”

- Jeppe Christiansen

Similarly in the political realm, powerful authorities are co-creating political narratives with their constituencies, rapidly iterating on and fueling content to feed the “flywheel”. How a message is communicated has become of equal importance to the message itself, especially if it is communicated in a way that audiences can easily grasp and relate back to their own experience. In our interview with Novo Holding’s board member Jeppe Christiansen, he discusses the authority of simplicity, saying: “[Leaders] need to have a perspective, yes, and it will only cut through if the messaging resonates with what people are looking for in a way that they understand.”

Relatability is a key word here. In an age of information abundance, finding points of view you can trust is increasingly difficult but shared lived experience has become a powerful tool in establishing authority. This partially explains the powerful cultural role of platforms like Reddit, that aggregate the personal experiences of people and organise them into communities.  

Key industry questions 

  • How can companies and brands lean into the co-creation of narratives with consumers and audiences to build shared authority?   

  • As shared lived experience becomes a crucial source of authority, how can traditional institutions adapt their communication and engagement strategies? 

  • What new forms of authority emerge when we embrace AI as a co-creator rather than viewing it as a threat?


Numbers and metrics 

In our age of hyper-quantification, what metrics should we pay attention to?

Numbers have become an increasingly powerful source of authority in our society from the rise of the “optimisation of self”, to the organisational level, where metrics have become so authoritative that they sometimes even get confused for the business strategy itself.

However, we also have been observing glimmers of doubt about just how authoritative numbers are and should be. Through our conversations with leaders across industries, we have heard a number of risks to granting numbers as much power as we do: 1) We lose track of whether the number we’re focusing on is really what matters most. For example, tracking the number of social interactions as opposed to their quality. 2) When we give numbers too much power, they actually influence behavior in ways that aren’t always helpful, for example, where heavy coverage of election polling can influence voter turnout. 3) We become myopic about specific metrics in particular and miss other important risks and opportunities. 4) We trust the numbers without being critical of which populations they are excluding, for example, in clinical trials.

The real value to individuals, companies, and society will be in measuring the more complex metrics like community strength, enfranchisement, belonging, and subjective internal states, as we discuss at our ReD Dialogue on meaningful metrics. Promising developments on this front are largely driven by AI, for example, the ability of large language models (LLMs) to inject large volumes of conversational text and measure the mood of a conversation. Or the ability of wearable technologies to collect and interpret much more environmental and social context than they have before. In many ways, these developments represent a kind of blurring of the traditional understanding of “qualitative” and “quantitative” data. 

Key industry questions 

  • How do we prevent numbers from becoming a substitute for strategy while still leveraging their power as decision-making tools?

  • With the emergence of AI and advanced measurement technologies capable of quantifying previously unmeasurable aspects of human experience (like mood and community strength), how should organisations adapt their evaluation frameworks?

  • What is the cutting edge of data collection and deployment for strategy development, and how can companies set themselves up to succeed?

Systems and Spaces

In building our future spaces and communities, what ideas and principles should guide our decision-making?

As we strive to build healthier, more inclusive communities, both IRL and online, a new set of principles to guide the design of these spaces is emerging. We have witnessed how poor design choices can lead to online polarised spaces, full of toxicity, trolling, and harrassment. And for IRL spaces, failure to consider multiple perspectives can lead to spaces that are unwelcoming, unused, or at worst restrictive to those who would benefit from its use the most. More engagement or more user growth is not always better if the space is not fostering the kinds of interactions we want to happen in a space. 

We have been following new leaders who are re-conceptualising the process for creating healthier communities with better outcomes for people. In our discussion around the revolutionary Mary Elizabeth Children’s Hospital in Copenhagen, we look at the importance of collaboration between different stakeholders, including medical professionals, designers, and project managers, to create a space that meets the needs of its users while also pushing the boundaries of traditional hospital design. 

Similarly, in online spaces and communities, leaders are grappling with designing systems that allow people to authentically connect with and adapt a core idea to their specific purpose. Where authority is often distributed, between bots, algorithms, and human community stewards, it is important to continue investing in building internal capabilities and developing practical tools to systematically spread new practices and ensure these spaces continue to foster a sense of healthy belonging.

Lastly, we see great leaders valuing and authentically engaging with skeptics and critics, turning potential opponents into advocates by involving them directly in shaping solutions. Resistance to change can actually be a resource for leaders if they’re willing to engage with it constructively.

Key industry questions 

  • How can healthcare institutions balance the growing emphasis on patient experience with traditional metrics of medical excellence and operational efficiency? 

  • How can organisations successfully maintain a core vision or principle through long-term, complex implementation processes with multiple stakeholders? 

  • How might large organisations create more coherent user experiences across fragmented systems and spaces? 



Leadership and credibility

To build knowledge and expertise, who and what are people turning to?

Our new reality demands a different kind of leadership and a new understanding of expertise, that’s less about broadcasting from the top down, and more about cultivating the right conditions for meaningful engagement and shared understanding. From our conversations with leaders, we have seen a number of new priorities for leaders. 

Firstly, today’s successful leaders are distinguished not by their individual ability to predict trends, but by their capacity to foster environments of trust. They understand that their role is to create conditions where organisations and communities can build strong bonds of trust among members, a challenge we see at the national level as well, laid out in our interview with Ali Noorani of the Hewlett Foundation, on the state of democracy.

Secondly,  leaders are increasingly making decisions by tapping into the collective wisdom of their employees, recognising new models and forms of expertise. As Reddit’s head of foresight Matt Klein tells us: “There’s something incredibly profound about collective intelligence…through that debate and through that messiness and through that criticism, things rise to the top.”

Finally, good leaders demonstrate humility by openly acknowledging what they don’t know, and empowering those with ideas or a vision to bring those to life. As leading economist Emily Oster, in our On Good Authority interview series, warned: “There’s so much resistance in expert advice to admitting uncertainty and this generates distrust.” 

“There’s something incredibly profound about collective intelligence…through that debate and through that messiness and through that criticism, things rise to the top.”

- Matt Klein

Key industry questions 

  • How are successful organisations adapting their leadership structures to harness collective intelligence rather than relying on traditional top-down visionary leadership, and what does this mean for the future of organisational decision-making?

  • As leadership evolves, how can organisations maintain credibility while being transparent about what they don’t know?

  • What leadership practices can help foster genuine trust in an environment of growing skepticism and fragmentation?





We invite you to immerse yourself in this special series here.
Please click
here if you’d like to continue the conversation with us.








Next
Next

On Good Authority: Ali Noorani