Why Trust is Hard

Hugh McCleod's art for Zappo's provides the foundation for trust in that environment

If I'm the head of HR, I'm responsible for filling the desks at my company with amazing employees. I can hold people to all the right standards. But ultimately I can't control what they do. This is why hiring for culture works. What Zappos does is radical because it trusts. It says "Go do the best job you can do for the customer, without policy". And leaves employees to come up with human solutions. Something it turns out they're quite good at, if given the chance.

Now let's take another domain, one I'm very famailar with - fault tolerant process control systems. Software and support hardware applied to emergency shutdown of exothermic chemical reactors - those that make the unleaded gasoline for our cars, nuclear reactors and conventional fired power generation, gas turbine controls, and other must work properly machines. And a similar domain of DO-178c flight control systems, which must equally work without fail and provide all the needed capabilities on day one.

At Zappos, the HR Diector describes a work environment where employess are free to do the best job they can for the customer. In the domains above, employees also work to do the best job for the customer they can, but flight safety, live safety, equipment safety are also part of that best job. In other domains we work, doing the best job for the customer means processing with extremely low error rates, transactions for 100's of millions of dollars of value in the enterprise IT paradigm. Medical insurance provider services, HHS enrollment, enterprise IT in a variety of domains.

Zappo's can recover from an error, other domains can't. Nonrecoverable errors mean serious loss of revenue, or even loss of live. In the other domains, failure is similar consequences. I come from those domains, they inform my view of the software development world - where software fail safe and fault tolerance is the basis of business success.

So when we hear about the freedom to fail early and fail often in the absence of a domain or context, care is needed. Without a domain and context, it is difficult to assess the credibility of any concept, let alone one that is untested outside of personal ancedote.

It comes down to Trust alone or Trust But Verify. I could also guarantee that Zappos has some of the verify process. It is doubtful employees are left to do anything they wish for their customer. The simple reason there is a business governance process at any firm, no matter the size. Behaviour, even full trust behavior fits inside that governance process.