Here was the surprise: Trust and accessibility mattered much more than competence. That doesn’t mean competence is irrelevant: People did rate their number one and number five helpers as more competent than their nonhelpers. (And IDEO has experts in a wide array of domains, so it’s pretty much guaranteed that the competence to solve any problem exists somewhere within the firm.) But the number one and number five helpers received fairly close scores for competence, whereas people trusted their top-ranked helpers more than they did their fifth-ranked helpers, and they trusted both much more than their nonhelpers. The results for accessibility were similar.