Symbol of Trust — My Head Is Spinning

July 20th, 2005 by Hal

A very interesting project has begun to develop trustworthiness in open systems software. It goes by the name of TROSTing. The project investigations are quite ambitious:

How can we be reliable at delivering open-systems components with demonstrable trustworthiness?
After that, how do we continuously strive for achieving and sustaining new levels of trustworthiness?

While I wonder what will come of such an ambitious project, I can't help but marvel at the thoughtfulness that has gone into the creation of the symbol of trust.

The symbol is a keeper. The important work remains.

Dennis Hamilton, the designer, calls the symbol "a fusion" of the Shewhart/Deming Cycle of Learning, Fernando Flores' Action Workflow, partnership, and an ever-progression (spiral) of one interaction to another.

I met Dennis when my auto-responder for the Let's Play Catch! mini-course failed to deliver one of the lessons. He wrote asking for the missing lesson. One thing led to another, soon we were deep into exploring what each other was doing. Dennis is in the midst of finishing his thesis for a masters degree in IT. He is also writing a weblog on open systems along with starting to build a community to explore trustworthiness in software.

I can't help but think of the application of a mark of trustworthiness for the project environment. Can you imagine the equivalent of the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval on a company offering to do project work? What could that mean? The AEC industry can be so contentious and generally distrusting. What if there were a collection of firms that were known broadly for just the opposite behaviors? There's no telling what might be produced by a consortium of those firms.

It's easier to talk about trust than it is to be trustworthy. I commend Dennis for putting this issue in front of us. Let's join him in his pursuit.

Produce Alignment and Trust in the Stories You Tell

Build Trust on Your Team

QnEK, It’s a Community

Trust Is Crucial in Project Coordination

The Trusted Leader Telecall

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 20th, 2005 at 11:18 pm and is tagged: leadership, innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. Convert this post to a PDF document.

Social Bookmarking

One Response to “Symbol of Trust — My Head Is Spinning”

Erudite Says:
July 26th, 2005 at 11:32 pm
Why Use Drugs When Great Ideas Get You Higher?

The concept of a Trusted Vendor delivering on the behavior and displaying the seal - PM, Consultant, Plumber - is exactly right and exciting. We have Trusted Site, Trusted Seller, lots of trusts. This beautiful idea creates the grain that others would want to go with - ‘go with’ in the sense of “let’s go with someone off the Trost Trustee list for XXX project.” In government it’s the Master Services Agreements, in private sector it’s being PMI certified and having projects under your belt. In Trost is attaining the accreditation and having it ’sealed’ for all to see.

Pardon me for dropping in and then dropping down to tactics but would this mean Trost would establish expectations, define success criteria, and measure performance, and then delivery leads to being registered as a Trost Trustee or a Trusted Trostee - a la CMM? This would be excellent in the Virtual Community where trust is the asset with great returns [once ill-invested, might lead to many negative returns].

Let me see what happens when I turn this knob: Apply the idea to Arthur Andersen [Enron]. Who audits? Third party? As a purchaser, I want to see the seal, the metaphor for trust, and feel free to invite them into the house.

I’ve been away for a while and now see that you guys have been doing brain surgery without me. I must have a lot of catch-up to do.

Erudite

Comment On This

If you haven't left a comment here before, you will need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.