Trust is earned.
Some fundamentally disagree with this statement. For those that disagree Trust is given freely. They give trust freely until such time as a person irrevocably betrays that trust. They believe that this leads to a method of management that creates hostile antagonistic workplaces rife with fear. A pattern of mistrust is established that leads others to be mistrustful and perpetuates a negative cycle of oppression.
I would agree that it sets up a behavior pattern that is negative and learned. However when I am asked to just trust someone this feels wrong to me. It’s not that I don’t trust them or do trust them It is more that I have no reason to trust them. For colleagues at work I have evidence to suggest that they won’t attack be suddenly with a gun or knife. So I trust them not to do that. However, for a man who steps out suddenly from a darkened alcove in a lonely ally… I don’t trust him that far. Why? I have no data to suggest that pattern of behavior is appropriate in that context.
So I propose that trust is earned not given freely. Most people conceptualize trust as a bank account +- (data from cognitive psychology). So how do we open an account and start filling it?
If someone says to me, you just need to trust “xxx” and I lack data to agree then I am paused. If I say I don’t trust them will they call me a distrustful or suspicious person? Are they trying to attack my value system? What do I say here to not get painted as an oppressive mistrustful person?
Think of trust as a Trust Loop and visibility as the key to seeding that loop. I make shared work or activity visible so that we can do something/anything together.
Trust is earned. Anything else is what I call faith. I avoid using faith (blind intuitive leaps) for what should be an empirical approach. Now you might argue I should have enough evidence to be comfortable with something and should trust them. Truly, if I can find the data and convince myself without spending too much time, then I will. But, please let’s not argue about lack of trust. That makes me crazy and I see it too often as a bullying technique to beat someone down or attack their value system because you don’t agree with them.
Scrum Values and I propose another
1. Commitment
2. Focus
3. Openness
4. Respect
5. Courage.
6. Visibility
Visibility is valued by me because it allows me to seed the trust loop. Once I can see or have experienced working with someone on anything my trust account grows. It takes time to know and grow a relationship. As the relationship grows it becomes easier to work with that person and make bigger leaps of understanding based on previously established rapport.
Hence my rule: Make it Visible
Make it visible is one of my foundational legs that the Scrum framework rests on.
Isn’t visibility redundant to openness?
Could be, depends on how you use the word openness. Do you have a context?
However, I still would not use that word for this.
Visibility is closer in meaning to the word see. And that is more like what I mean. If I can see it then I know where to apply my energy. A large part of our brain is wired for processing visual information. Openness is a word that is further away from seeing/imagery.
As I see Transparency and Openness was always part of the scrum foundation and values.In my perspective transparency and openness leads to visibility, would be great to hear your thoughts on how different is transparency and openness from visibility , for visibility to be meaningful does it not have to be transparency and open?
Today I was having a discussion with couple CSTs about trust and one the questions we asked overselves was if Trust is earned , who would start giving trust in the first place, would it not get teams into a waiting game , I will trust Jim when he trusts me.
I would rather give trust freely than earning trust ,especially when a team makes a commitment to embrace a new way of working upholding Scrum values and principles. I believe it would we most effective to give trust freely when we know that we are going to be working in a open, collaborative and self organizing environment.
“Be the change you want to see in the world” – Mahatma Gandhi
Transparency is for seeing into something. They way it is commonly used by our agile community, it means my work is supposed to be transparent. Does that mean my work is see through? This has never made sense to me even when I first heard it posed 10 years or so ago.
I want to see my work so that I know what it is.
Transparency is for the person on the outside who wants to see into the system. In that context transparency makes perfect sense. Although I can extend it to the person doing that work that all of their work should be transparent, I have found that difficult to explain and think in terms of. What works well for me and has for my teams is to say. Make your work visible. And from outside the team it is be transparent or roll up a report that allows someone to see into the teams progress and understand.
So transperancy is for management to inform decision making and visibility is for the team to self-organize.
About trust. Look at the loop that I propose and see if your definition of trust is in there. Did I grow up thinking like Mahatma or did I learn to think that way after collecting sufficient evidence on how to best fit into this world? Did Mahatma always know this or was it a learned behavior? (this could become a religious discussion at this point but, that is not about empirical understanding)
I agree strongly with the statement Gandhi makes. “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Just because I say trust is earned it does not mean that those statements are not true for me. That is a great statement on how to live and act in this world and I hope more people act that way.
Imagine two people walking into a small clearing in the woods for the first time. There is a small pond with fresh water. These two people come from opposite sides and see each other. They are both looking for water to drink because they are so thirsty. Both are carrying guns because they are on opposite sides of the a conflict. They both look up and stop. Do they decide not to react and kill each other because they see no threat? do they decide to kill each other because they see a threat?
Observation is the first thing we do then orient, then decide and then act. It supports that the first thing our brain does is react to visual information. Then we make judgement decisions. Trust shows up second but, something seeds it. As we encounter dozens of more pieces of information we might develop a war time protocol that is no shooting near the small pond in the clearing. That is a neutral zone… etc.
So this brings us back to another part of the conversation. What is self-organization and how does it work?