Trust

“I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you”
- Friedrich Nietzsche

A super weekend to round off a tremendous week. Made some good progress with my son's writing skills. There is a significant gap between his ability with a computer and his ability with a pencil. The latter lagged behind, prmiarily because of a lack of interest. Rather than make writing a chore, I have invented games that require writing and that seems to have worked a treat! We had a fantastic BBQ on Saturday with quite a few friends and then relaxed on Sunday.

One theme I observed was the utility of trust. Some people view it as some precious entity in itself, a source of offence if it is not present. But is that the real essence of trust? I would suggest that trust simply saves time (and hence money). Stephen Covey (Jnr) wrote a book called Business at the Speed of Trust, where he expounded the commercial value of trust. Trust is like a lubricant that oils the engines of business and life in general. Decision-making is much easier and quicker if there is trust.

If I want to buy your company and I trust you, do I need to hire an army of lawyers and accountants to carry out due diligence and draft water-tight legal documents?Do I need to check you out? To check out the company's transaction history? Or would it suffice for you to tell me what I want to know and I simply sign? Trust. If I want to hire someone for a particular role, I could go through the long sequence of getting CVs from agencies and then arranging phone interviews and then face-to-face interviews, perhaps even assessments etc. Very time-consuming and costly. However, if I trust you and you say to me "I know this guy, he's absolutely perfect for the role!", could I not save myself a lot of checking? This is where social networks like LinkedIn can be very useful, if relationships are build on a bedrock of trust.

There are many more examples, but the theme is simply that trust saves time. So we need to examine what constitutes trust. Stephen Covey describes it as being made up of two elements - Character and Competence. You trust someone either because they are of good character or because they are competent. Even if you are the most honest, principled saint in the world, I would not trust you to perform a SAP Security negative test unless you have the competence. Vice-versa, if you were a genius at SAP Security but were prone to a bit of corruption, I wouldn't trust you either.

So, to finish off, let's return to Friedrich Nietzsche's quote. The real problem with the fact that you lied to me is not that my feelings have been hurt ("how could you!?"). It is the fact that from now, I cannot simply trust what you say. Therefore it will cost me time and money to verify or find out for myself.