I’ve bounced off writing this article several times in the past and I’m still trying to find a good way into it. Here’s the (n+1)th take on it anyway.

Trust is everything. Trust is what keeps the wheels turning. Trust is when all parties are pointing in the right direction and nobody’s playing CYA games. Trust is opening a joint account and moving in together. Trust is when you stop using contraception…

It’s not just emotional relationships, it’s vital in business too. Too often one comes across business cultures where nobody trusts anyone else; it’s endemic in the Dilbert worldview and it can cripple an organisation. It’s so easy to do: everyone knows that Marketing/Sales/IT/Management/Finance/The Programmers/Creatives are Evil Trolls/Self Serving Prima Donnas/Idiots/Leeches/Whatever. But… imagine that isn’t true; imagine instead that everyone in the company cares about doing a good job and delivering stuff of value. Now act as if you believe it.

That’s why it’s so refreshing to read about Agile methods. Trust is hardwired into them at such a deep level that almost nobody bothers to mention it. It’s why they seem like such radical ideas, they are so far removed from the standard view of how organisations work. Much of the (remarkably vehement) criticism (and subsequent failure to communicate) that I’ve seen seems to stem from the fact that the critics are worried about the downside when trust breaks down and the advocates are just getting on with trusting each other because it works.

It’s so easy to be cynical; to sit back and say “The world doesn’t work that way.” After all, simply by doing so you prove yourself right. But so what? You were right. Well whoopee doo. Apart from a warm glow of self-righteousness, what did that achieve?

I used to despair of my mother, who goes through life with the blithe assumption that people are generally good and kind and honest, and who is good and kind and honest herself. I used to think that she was going to be ripped off at every turn but, do you know, she wasn’t. Yes, it happened occasionally, and when it did she was deeply hurt, but it didn’t change the way she lives her life. To change, to become suspicious and cynical about other people’s motives would be a far, far greater loss than anything that was lost through trusting freely. So that’s how I try to live too. It is both easy and hard to do.

I’ve come to believe that people repay trust with trustworthiness. I was delighted to read in the New Scientist about an experiment which seemed to back up my intuition. In an experiment, randomly selected people were asked to give up to $10 dollars to a person who was unknown to them. That other person would receive 3 times as much money as the first person gave, and could then return any amount of money to the first person. (The subjects didn’t know who the other party was, the ‘game’ was handled by software). Economic theory, in the shape of the Nash Equilibrium says that the rational thing to do is for the first person to give $0. The second person’s rational strategy would be to keep all money they were given and to return none of it. This is not what happened. It turns out that 50% of the first subjects sent some money, and of those who received money, 75% returned some. (There appears to be a reasonably simple neurological mechanism underlying this surprising (to economists) high level of trust, the paper has more details).

So, how do you increase the level of trust around you? Start by trusting yourself. Start trusting others and expecting to be trusted in return. Start being open about problems and triumphs; if you finish some code early, let your manager know, if you realise that what you’re working on is going to to be late, let him know as soon as you know, maybe then he can reprioritise to make sure the important stuff is done — he certainly can’t do that if you don’t tell him. And keep doing it. It’s no good if you give up after a week. NB: This doesn’t mean always agreeing with people, but remember that, no matter how stupid a request may seem, there’s a reason for it; don’t just dismiss it out of hand. And if you can’t change your organisation, change your organisation — being in a no/low trust environment is a soul destroying process, you owe it to yourself to move on to somewhere better. Trust yourself to find the right place.

Trust is its own reward; betrayal its own punishment. A few years ago now, my wife was talking to a Quaker friend of hers and said “It must be awful to be in prison knowing you are innocent.”

“Oh,” said her friend, “it must be far worse to be in prison knowing you are guilty.”