Rachel Botsman on Trust, AI & the Polish Engineer Who Saw Work as Harmony

Rachel-Botsman-GettyImages-951905804.jpg, large, Rachel Botsman, photograph by James Brickwood/Fairfax Media via Getty Images via Getty Images

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At a time when AI can generate answers before we have fully formed our questions, and institutions are struggling to be believed, Rachel Botsman’s work feels unusually timely. Known for defining trust as 'a confident relationship with the unknown', she has spent years studying the invisible forces that shape how we live, work and decide whom to believe.

During her visit to Poland with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, Botsman turned to an unexpected figure: Karol Adamiecki, the Polish engineer whose harmonograms transformed work into visual scores of rhythm, synchronisation and human labour. In this conversation, she reflects on Adamiecki’s forgotten legacy, the roots of leadership, the future of cultural institutions, and why outsourcing thought to machines may be more than a technological shift.

A confident relationship with the unknown

Agnes Dudek: Your work moves between writing, teaching, design, public speaking and now installation-making. For readers who may be encountering you for the first time, how would you describe the central question that has guided your work?

Rachel Botsman: The thread that runs through my work is a fascination with the invisible forces that shape society and our lives, and with how we can make those forces visible to people. For a long time, that force was trust. Now, I am very interested in thinking and thought. The medium does not really matter to me. I am always trying to help people understand something that is hidden, something that may be changing, or something that is affecting their lives in many different ways.

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Rachel Botsman, Zachęta – Narodowa Galeria Sztuki, 2026, photo: Kuba Celej/IAM

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AD: Is that what brought you to Poland?

RB: It was a multitude of reasons. I am a huge believer in field trips and immersion, and I am always looking for the right opportunities to immerse myself.

More specifically, I had been researching what I would call artefacts, and I came across the Adam Mickiewicz Institute through projects such as Exercising Modernity and Records of Waiting. I was so struck by the thoughtfulness, the concept and the execution of that work. I thought: I have to find out who the people behind this are.

There was something in the sensibility – the design sensibility, but also the ethnographic process and the history – that felt very close to how I approach my own work. I felt there was a synchronisation there, and that it would be really interesting to explore.

AD: How did Karol Adamiecki become important to your work? What connection do you see between his ideas about harmony and your own work on trust, or your work more generally?

RB: I first came across Karol’s work almost like a detective narrowing things down. I was trying to understand where the language of business – concepts like productivity, efficiency and output – had come from, because these are not new concepts. And I thought: maybe if I can understand their origins, I will think differently about them.

So, I started to dig into questions like: who was the first person to visualise multiple roles? Who was the first person to think about ergonomics? All these questions. I was coming up with clusters of Americans, and then I would go deeper, and Karol came up. I am really interested in polymaths, particularly people who are musicians or artists but also think in a very scientific way, because that combination of visualisation, precision and data is so powerful. I was blown away by his harmonograms. I thought: these are works of art. They look like musical scores to me. I just thought: who created these?

Then, of course, I discovered that everything was in Polish, and I started reading what had been written about him. But when I dug deeper, I thought: this guy was way more influential than people think. Because I had studied the later layers of management history, I could see his influence. What I did not understand was how he was connected to the Americans. Was his work borrowed? Was it absorbed without recognition? Or was there some form of collaboration?

Those were the questions I wanted to understand. But above all, I wanted to understand the person and the mind that came up with this idea of harmonisation: that work, like a conductor, could be harmony, and that people – not just outputs, results and money – could be optimised if you could find synchronisation.

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Karol Adamiecki – professor at Warsaw University of Technology. Portrait photograph, photo: National Digital Archives (NAC)

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AD: How did you get around the language barrier?

RB: The lucky thing is that he was very visual. I think that if he had not drawn these things, we would have missed one another. But I could see what he was saying in his own language.
I was so blown away that he was taking something as complex as a steel factory and distilling it into lines that someone who did not understand his language could still read. And I am kind of glad there was a language barrier, because I think I had to work really hard to understand the essence of what he was saying.

But the reason I wanted to come to Poland was that I hit a wall. There was only so far I could go.
I think one of the best things to have come out of this trip is that, although not many people have studied him, we met some of the professors who have. It felt like they passed on this capsule of knowledge. But there are now so many threads to explore: his connection to some of the Americans, and his connection to some of these places. I think we are now going to find a different picture of Karol that maybe has not yet been gathered, because there is still a lack of global recognition of how influential he is and was.

AD: You have spent many years thinking about trust – in relation to technology, institutions, work and society. Why did trust become such a compelling subject for you?

RB: Because it is so hard to understand. I love things that are hard to understand. I love things that you cannot touch, and that everyone has a different belief around. I am really drawn to complexity. Every time I thought I understood trust, another context would appear and I realised I did not. First, it was: this is really interesting in terms of technology – how we trust technology. Then it was: this is really interesting in relation to news, media and misinformation. Then politics. Then institutions. We talk about institutions, but what is an institution, and how does it work?
Then local trust became interesting, because during the pandemic everyone was suddenly trusting their neighbours. So every time I thought I was done with trust, and was going to break up with it, another thing came along that I did not understand.

I also get very frustrated with management speak, where something sounds glossy, but when you dig and prod, you realise it is not really there. That is why my work takes such a long time. I need to arrive at something I can distil down – like a definition. My definition of trust is 'a confident relationship with the unknown'. That is how I define trust.

AD: But how can we trust what we do not know? How can we feel confident in the unknown.

RB: That is the tension, right? If you know how something is going to turn out, or there is no risk, you do not need trust. But there are not many situations in our lives where we know how things are going to turn out.

So I am not saying you should trust someone when you do not know them, or trust a product when you do not know how it works. I am actually saying the opposite. The question is: what information do you need about this person, product or thing in order to give it permission to play in the unknown with you? Because if you always have to watch that thing or that person, or understand exactly how it works, that takes a lot of emotional and cognitive energy. What trust does is allow you to let go.

The easiest way to think about this is in relationships, where you put the work in. You really understand what that person is capable of doing. You understand where that person is going to show up, or where they might let you down. You understand that person’s interests, motives and even energy. Once that foundation is there, amazing things can happen in that relationship or situation.

AD: Has your research changed the way you work, or the way you relate to trust personally – not only in relation to Adamiecki, but more generally?

RB: Totally. I think I always know there is something in the work when I can feel shifts in myself, or when I talk about it and someone says: I can’t do the same thing in the same way, or think the same way. We trust on so many levels, to be honest. I think I was an over-trusting person. I did not think enough about context. I thought trust was something that just transferred from one situation to the next.

I did not think enough about what happens when I am making a decision under pressure, in a high-risk situation, and therefore cannot speed that situation or decision up. I also did not think enough about the moments when I become controlling and micromanage other people, and about recognising that this is actually because I am not trusting them. It is like a lens you cannot turn off, and it is quite useful. It also helps with recognising when people do not trust me, which is really hard. Sometimes you can say: actually, this has nothing to do with me. This is coming from the other person, and whatever I give or say to that person is not going to change it. In that case, giving it no oxygen is the best way. Or the flip side is: I did actually do something, and I need to repair that. So it is very helpful.

Finding balance

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Karol Adamiecki, professor at Warsaw University of Technology and director of the Institute of Scientific Organisation of Work, with American engineer Harrington Emerson, photo: National Digital Archives (NAC)

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