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.