At BestBrains we firmly believe in trust as a key factor in successful Software Development.
We have all seen and experienced situations with lack of trust:
Teams where problems are hidden instead of brought to the surface
because team members does not trust their colleagues or managers,
Companies where lack of trust between departments, leads to inefficient
non-negotiable contracts between e.g Product Management and
Development, and relations between customers and suppliers of large
IT-projects where complicated contracts replace collaboration.
As engineers we do also traditionally see the lack of trust as a
problem that mainly has its roots not in engineering, but on the other
side of the fence, where people decide not to trust engineers. In our
own self-understanding we are off-course trustworthy.
Saturday
night I had an experience that led me to think, that maybe it is not
that simple. Maybe there is a reason for the lack of trust, and maybe
engineers has a role to play in changing the equation.
The
event was a play at
Copenhagen's beautiful new playhouse. The name of the play
was "Håndværkerne" - "The Craftsmen". In the play a young couple had
hired a group of craftsmen to renovate their house. Again and again the
work was delayed, and often the craftsmen asked for more money, with a
sentence like "We know it is difficult for you as lay-men to
understand, but it is not possible to predict this kind of - [some
construction technicality here] - but it is common, and there is
really no choice, but to pay the money, otherwise the work will come to
a halt". The young couple got more and more desperate with a feeling of
total loos of control, and ended up killing the craftsmen one by one.
Now they could start over with a new crew - that apparently were more
trustworthy, or the couple knew how to manage them, because it all
ended with a party in the beautiful renovated house.
A friend stated afterwards, that
this play was about the revenge of the Danish middle-class. For a
number of years there has been a shortage of skilled labor, which has
led to a upward price-spiral and a downward quality-spiral. Nearly
everyone around the table had experiences with delays, poor quality,
and exorbitant prices.
Maybe similar
experiences in the Software Industry has led to the current misery and
lack of trust in many companies and between customers and suppliers.
Maybe at some places arrogant, non-professional engineering
organizations has driven their counterparts and customers to a level of
desperation, where they, since we do normally not kill each other in
Danish companies, have invented systems of contracts, and processes
that mainly serves to protect from the lack of trust.
So how do we as engineers learn from this? In my view it is not enough
to say "Trust me". We must prove to be trustworthy, and the road to
that goes through delivering on our promises and by giving our
customers, and the organization we are serving a level of real control
with the process. First then engineering organizations can begin to
expect others to trust them and thus be able to remove the
inefficiencies of mistrust.