(2012-01-09) Boyd Getting To Trust Better Swift Than Deep

Getting To Trust: Better Swift Than Deep. Venessa Miemis is trying to get a group of ‘change agents’ to collaborate, and is finding it hard going. ()(2012-01-08) Miemis How Will We Collaborate If We Can't Trust Each Other)

I think Venessa is trying to do something that’s very hard: she’s trying to get a group to form a collective, with a shared set of principles and shared goals. And she’s right. To get there you have to build deep trust: a polite way to say that the folks in the collective have to sort out the politics involved. In general that can take months, even when the participants share a great deal in common in education, background, and temperament.
But why form a collective? As she points out, it’s risky

The way of the future is cooperation, not collaboration.

Among other reasons cooperation merely requires swift trust, a well-researched human universal. People are capable in some circumstances of relaxing their general desire to establish deep trust – that time-consuming, political practice –and will simply adopt a role in a project, and suspend their disbelief about other’s motives, etc.

A lot of communication is needed to keep it all working, but much less than in deep trust organizations, like the conventional enterprise.
This is how freelancers generally work, and it’s the way that cities work.

Me, I’m trying to work on a few interesting projects with some smart people, but I am not pushing them into one group and trying to create a way that all of us can be involved in everything.

these will be three discrete projects, with non-overlapping groups of participants

such collectives are not a higher form of human solidarity that we should aspire to, and are not what we have to build in order to get big things done. On the contrary. An increasing proportion of professional work is being performed by freelancers, who live in a short-term project based economy.

The costs of deep trust are too high, in general, for what they return. This is one reason that work is changing so quickly. Companies are loosening their hold on employees, providing them more autonomy, relaxing the requirements for deep trust: becoming more like cities and less like traditional armies, with everyone is made to march in step, and pointed in the same direction, all the time.