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Trust needs a process behind it
Blind trust
Before Chelsea Ryckis had solid processes at Ethos Benefits, delegating meant blind trust. She kept telling herself it was good, over and over. It did not work, because her body still reacted. Her employees never saw her freaking out, but inside she was.
Seeing the work
What worked was insight. Instead of asking every day how a project was going, she could look at the system and notice that one person had a specific item outstanding for 15 days. There was a due date, there was a response, and she could track it. She did not need to control the process. She needed to see that they had it.
Operationalizing trust
That was when her body responded. A team should be able to do its job, since people are hired to solve problems, yet a team is only as good as its processes. With structure in place she could scale fast and hard without breaking her body. It comes down to operationalizing trust through the efficiency, the feedback, and the accountability.
How did 'trust but verify' reach Reagan?
The phrase comes from the Russian proverb "doveryai, no proveryai." Suzanne Massie, an American scholar of Russian culture, taught it to Ronald Reagan in the mid-1980s. Reagan repeated it to Mikhail Gorbachev at the December 1987 signing of the INF Treaty. The treaty eliminated an entire class of US and Soviet intermediate-range missiles.
How do visual boards keep teams accountable?
Toyota's production system uses visual management, in which the status of work can be read at a glance. Kanban cards, developed at Toyota in the 1940s and 1950s under Taiichi Ohno, signal what is needed and when. Kanban is the Japanese word for signboard. Software teams adopted kanban boards in the mid-2000s, largely through the work of David J. Anderson.
Why do bigger teams need more process?
Fred Brooks observed in his 1975 book The Mythical Man-Month that communication paths grow faster than headcount. The number of possible pairs among n people is n times n minus one, divided by two. A team of 5 has 10 pairs, and a team of 10 has 45. Brooks used this to argue that adding people to a late software project can make it later.
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