Clarke Ching - More Chilli Please

Carnival of Trust

Hello my friends!

Can you recommend any good articles or blog posts about software development and trust?

I'm hosting June's Carnival of Trust and I'd like to give it a software development focus.

Any suggestions?

Clarke

Trust and negotiations

Very good reading: http://www.ayeconference.com/Articles/Chinesecontract.html

Several cultures contain a fable about a horse, a Farmer, and a wolf. After a time both plagued by the wolf the Farmer and horse agree to work together to defeat their common foe. The horse's speed and stamina combined with the Farmer's weapons and cleverness win out. The horse then asks the Farmer to remove the bridle and saddle - their agreement being at an end. "The hell you say." replies the Farmer, "Giddiyap Dobbin." as he applies the spurs with a will.

This parable is a warning about deals that don't work out so well. It's charming and memorable as such parables are when they are good, but a little hard to work with in real life. Most contracts are not about donning saddles and bridles to hunt down wolves. So, I'd like to offer a checklist for the mechanics of deals that work out well:

by Jim Bullock.

Trust - meeting commitments

Would you trust someone who said (on a podcast) that their some stuff about "TRUST" on their website but when you got to the website no such link existed?

Maybe ... maybe not.

It's kinda irrelevent now because the link now exists. 

Although I wrote it quickly I am pleased with this blog post I wrote about trust.  The HBR article I mentioned there (which I very briefly helped to edit long before hbr became involved) is truely excellent.

This blog points to a couple of my favourite thinkers on Trust - David Maister and Charles Green.  David writes one of the best business blogs out there.  Charle's Trust Based Selling is one of the most profound books I have ever read. 

Oh, and Charles is a profoundly nice person too - which you would kinda think would be obvious for someone who writes and talks about trust ... but (trust me when I tell you) it is far easier to talk about trust than to be trustable and trustworthy.  Earlier this year Charles  offered me help (unsolicited) with some ideas I was playing with in my book.  I got sick shortly afterwards and ended up extremely ill in hospital.  It was over a month before I could think again and I never returned his email ... I guess I've got some catching up to do.

I was a slow started when it came to thinking about TRUST ... it wasn't until I learned about the work of Fernando Flores that I came to be able to "see" the symptoms of the absence of trust.  Fernando's work is very, very hard to read and I thankful that I had the chance to work for a consulting company which specialised in implementing Flores work.  I still can't read his writing though and be a little annoyed - why on earth didn't he employ a ghost writter like my hero Eli Goldratt?  That way the rest of the world would have heard of him and his important ideas.

I never made promises lightly

There's a very good article in the current Harvard Business Review about Promise Based Management.  The article is written by Donald N. Sull and Charles Spinosa.

Until earlier this year, I worked with Charles at Vision consulting.  Before I left I was working with him editing an article which he had written, intending to turn it into a comprehensive white paper about what Vision calls Commitment Based Management.  There's a lot of overlap in the hbr article although the it is much, much, much better edited!

I write about Commitment/Promised based management within my own book and I use the principles constantly in my own consulting work.  The principles - unfortunately - are very simple to understand, but hard to "live". 

Here's a quick overview of the principles, as I use them:

• Trust is key.  With trust work is easy, things happen quickly, waste disappears.  When trust is missing things take longer, take more effort and cost more due to the incredibly wasteful activities needed to ensure that things work despite the lack of trust.
• A simple example might help.  A few weeks ago I had a very early morning flight and I used my blackberry as an alarm clock for the first time.  I went to bed a little earlier that night and I dozed off earlier too, so I should be fighting fit the next morning, but I wasn't; I only managed about 3 hours sleep.  Why?  Because I didn’t trust that the blackberry alarm would work properly (since I'd never used it) and nor did I trust myself to have set it correctly.  I found myself waking up to check the time every 30 minutes or so, just to check that it wasn’t after 4:45 yet and that the alarm clock hadn’t failed me. I litterally had a sleepless night because of a lack of trust.
• Look at your relationships - at work, at home - and rate the level of trust in each relationship from high to low.  Ask yourself which of the relationships are easy, which are wasteful, which are profitable, which are draining ... and then ask yourself what you'd prefer: high- or low-trust relationships.
• One of the key causes of high trust is making and keeping commitments where both parties win.  Making commitments and not keeping them loses trust.  Making commitments where both parties don't win create resentment are lowers trust.
• Ask yourself if you make commitments and keep them.
• Start using the words "commitment" and "trust" more often.  You'll be surprised how quickly that will change your own thinking and the thinking of your colleagues and friends.
• Study Lean, Agile, Theory of Constraints, and Quality thinking.  Apply them so that you can learn how to make commitments that you keep.
• Read "Getting to YES" - because principled negotiation - and win-win thinking is a vital aspect of making commitments that you can keep.

I recommend that you splash out the $6.00 and purchase the article.  Then read it!  Then think about it.  And think about it some more.