I’m fascinated by how simple routines can lead to fundamentally amazing things like trust.
Wherever I’ve lived, I’ve had the good fortune of buying things from the same shops in a very regular, routine-ish way. This has helped me befriend a variety of shopkeepers. Grocers, dairy product shopkeepers, supermarket clerks, local corder-of-the-road shopkeepers (we call them kirana here).
I moved to Bangalore — and to this new place we live in — just a few months back. Right opposite to our colony is this supermarket where we (my brother and I) buy things. But we’re not frequent shoppers here. We have another shop nearer to the house from where we buy most stuff. But there are certain things we get only at this said supermarket. Our travels to the supermarket has therefore been infrequent to say the least.
Of late, I’ve made it a point to include curd in my dinner. This means I’ve got to get curd and the timing of my return from work (late night) means I can buy curd only at the supermarket. So for about a month or so, at about closing time for the supermarket, I walk in, — often the last shopper I think — grab a packet of curd from the refridgerator and pay.
There are things so atypical here (but not totally uncommon). At a supermarket, people usually buy a bunch of things. Also, people shop at the supermarket in the evenings. Basically, atypicality of my buying makes me somewhat conspicuous. And that has helped.
One clerk at the supermarket recognizes me so well that we don’t even have to go through the motions of billing, paying, getting the receipt etc. I just walk past the counter showing the packet of curd in my hand, plant a tenner in his outstretched hand while we exchange a brief moment of acknowledgement — both of us smiling at each other — and I make my way out.
When I say trust is a byproduct of routines (with other variables in right order), it sounds oversimplified but I think routines are key ingredients in establishing trust.
In many ways, familiarity (on which trust relies heavily) is directly impacted by routines. Our subconscious systems of processing information are somewhat easily skewed by the idea of familiarity. We tend to associate familiarity with trust. And routines make us familiar with events, people, things etc.
We trust people because we’re familiar with them. Friends trust each other because they are familiar with the characteristics of the other. Sometimes, there are even irrational connections. I’d pick my friend (who is less experienced in accountancy) to do my taxes than hire a complete professional stranger. This is not because I don’t trust the stranger (who I know is a professional) but I trust my friend more. I trust that my friend would be more responsible and take it personally.
We also have other ways to establish trust. We have built these systems in order to make our lives easier. For instance, we have certifications for physicians and we believe in these certifications. So when we are sick, we don’t necessarily look out for a friend who is a physician but look for expert physicians with the best credentials. There is the link of familiarity here too for we don’t look for the best credentials by way of certificates and years of experience alone. We ask our friends and family. And we almost trust the recommendations because we do go to the recommended doctors.
But what confounds me is trust at the workspace. Routines and familiarity here only cause a superficial level of trust. People are entrusted with responsibilities based on a few factors like their past experience, references, the kind of work they do right now and of course the assumption that they are here to do great work for the company.
The best teams producing the best works usually are made up of friends who have known each other for a long time. In this case, there’s a lot of trust built over years of co-working. In many ways, the quality of work produced is a direct result of the trust each member has for the other.
At the workspace, trust impacts in many ways. A manager with a high level of trust in their team doesn’t have to micromanage tasks and doesn’t really have to worry about the quality of work either. They just have to direct the team towards a specific, meaningful goal that the team believes in and the team takes care of the rest.
So if we are to optimize a new team’s workflow and get them to speed on working great, we need to go beyond nominal systems of trust (like experience in the field and seniority and familiarity). Personal ratification is given the highest value when it comes to establishing trust. That is, you’ll trust someone readily if they have proved their worth to you by their work / actions, much more than what their resumes say.
Nominal systems of trust are credentials. That resume. Or those words of introduction a manager gives while introducing a new team member. But we must get beyond this. One way companies attack this problem is to get new members to work one-on-one with other members on some small thing. This helps new members of a team to connect on a personal level. I’ve seen that this goes a longer way in helping older members understand the workflows, processes and characteristics of the new member. And vice versa.
Our systems of work have evolved from centralized nodes to distrubuted nodes. And if Hivemind turns out to be true, replicable and efficient, we will need better systems of trust enablers in our workspaces and networks. The open source community solves this intuitively by getting new contributors to take the initiative, responsibility and lead in some small (or may be big) aspect of an open source project. Pull requests speak. And that builds trust. There are no gatekeepers. There are only quality ensurers.
I’ve been thoroughly interested by the Hivemind idea. But where my suspicions lie are in the improbability of trust enabling systems to be extremely quick. Unless it’s within our DNA (like those of the bees where the hive trusts the individual worker bee capability and information), it’s very hard to trust at the workspace when it’s only trust that can get us forward. It’s more like investing in the stock market now. You go bust or you go forward.
People and workplaces that have solved this problem are better equipped to process the hivemind and create a network of that sort (and reap its benefits). Workplaces that are still struggling at the trust thing will be left behind, grappling with old models of work like nodes and centralization.
Many workspaces will refuse to acknowledge that there’s always that element of trust deficit that prevents members from completely taking charge of one aspect of a project while trusting the other member to do the same for another aspect. Petty things like egos and past experiences do keep us from doing that. Also, the fact remains that there is a lot more incompetence and mediocrity than there is excellence and passion.
Solving the trust enabling system, then, seems like the most interesting first step for workspaces to crack.