I stumble across a tweet Justin Kan about trust. It makes so much sense. But wait! I don’t really work like that. The wisdom doesn’t seem to fit with me.
I briefly thought maybe I should adopt this personal wisdom for self-improvement. I analyze my past experiences. I realize I slowly departed from the notion of trust over the years.
Trust, but Verify
This Russian proverb became popular when President Ronald Reagan started to using it. You need a verification process. People generally don’t trust each other. But if we don’t trust each other, nothing gets done. So some level of trust requires to move things forward. But you verify. This is generally a good framework.
Trust vs. Process
Big organizations have cumbersome process. It’s because stake holders generally don’t trust their employees to do the right things on their own. Process is a way for management to ensure employees to produce result. People hates process. It reduces them into mechanical machines. They find ways to get around process.
Uncertainty of Human Behavior
Trust creates black and white labels of human behavior. When we see someone do what they say, we call them trustworthy. Otherwise, we cannot trust them. But this type of label forces us to conform in order to gain trust. It leads to herd mentality. If we deviate from expectation, we are seen as not trustworthy. We demand others to behave in certain ways in other to maintain trust.
Instead of seeing trust as black and white, we should think of trust as a continuum. One is neither trustworthy nor untrustworthy. For example, when I trust my colleague to deliver his tasks, I mean he has a high chance of finishing his tasks on time. There’s still a chance that he won’t deliver. When I trust a vendor to pay me, I mean they’re likely to send me a check. There’s still a chance that they won’t pay me.
Everyone has different thresholds of trust. What people think as trustworthy could be lower than our expectation. If we use our subjective experience to gauge trust in other people, we’d likely be disappointed. Trust is often just an illusion we created for ourselves.
