Building trust requires risk

Catia highlighted trust as her favourite value. I wholeheartedly agree. This is one of the key perquisites and an enabler for true learning and effective collaboration. I’m happy Yves followed up. He told a great story about Joppe, his son.

I love this story. You should go an read it now.

Imagine Joppe wasn’t climbing trees but playground toys and frames instead, like Zosia, or a climbing wall with gear and protection. A safe, soft, shock-absorbent surface underneath. Even though Yves might still think he needs to trust his boy to climb anything - his heart wouldn’t be pounding nearly as much. He wouldn’t sweat as he might when Joppe misses a branch. Accepting that Joppe loves to climb trees and allowing him to do so is powerful at building trust. It works so well, because Yves includes a healthy does of _essential trust-building ingredient - risk _.

This is something I often see people miss. If you want to establish trust there must be risk involved. You can’t just tell people you trust them to get them coding and then send three project managers to watch their every move and ask for detailed reports every week.

Yves also asked and interesting question: “When you need more trust to write, why did it work to organize ALE2011”.

It reminded me of a conversation on twitter some time ago:

[blackbirdpie id=”101677423875207168”]
[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/mhsutton/status/101777910465171457”]
[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/PDarrall/status/101778150190616577”]
[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/mfloryan/status/101911869039714304”]
[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/PDarrall/status/101985417150205952”]

I’m now thinking that perhaps how quickly we establish trust has something to do with the nature of risk involved.

Creating a large, ambitious pan-European conference is a risky business, it’s inherently risky (that’s why adopting real options worked so well for us as ALE2011). Employing a stranger is also a risky venture, no matter how good we think we are at recruitment (to understand better why, read Gladwell’s “Most Likely to Succeed - How Do We Hire When We Can’t Tell Who’s Right for the Job?”). These are situations where risk is external, we have very limited control over it - therefore granting people trust straight away is a sensible strategy.

Writing a story together, on the other hand, can be risky too but we are able to control it. Yves may decide which tree Joppe can attempt so he can slowly aim for the bigger ones and thus building trust gradually. Going for a piecemeal build-up of trust may be a better approach. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

If Yves’ favourite one-liner about trust is:

_ Trust is given, not earned. _

I would add my complimentary one:

_ Building trust requires risk. _