Over a career that has now spanned seven decades, I’ve learned one thing: No matter how many schedules, lists, plans, budgets and to-do lists we may arm ourselves with, none of them matter if we don’t have trust. Relational trust, that is. The kind that exists between two or more people. Trust me on this. More than an ironic musing, it’s a fact. But what is trust, really?
Trust Deconstructed
For many of us, trust is like art: We can’t quite describe its qualities, but we know it when we have it. We can see it in one another’s eyes. We have a feeling. But do we really understand what trust is?
Trust is an agreement, often a tacit understanding between two parties (or possibly between yourself and one of the other voices in your head if you’re trusting yourself). It’s an earned belief, endorsement or willingness to base your own future outcome on a shared intention or action by another person. Trust is based on judgment, experience, context or past performance. Trusting someone requires that you assume potential risk, real or reputational, but less so if your trust has been confirmed in the past.
Like a credit card, trust is the granting of current credit based on a belief or faith in a future action, outcome or state. It’s an affirmation or validation of character. I trust you’ll do it. I believe you will. Like viewing a movie or theatrical performance, trust requires the suspension of question or disbelief that what someone’s says or will do, their words or actions, will align with what they say they will. Trust is an implied or inferred assurance of a future condition.
Trust is based on the promise, belief or expectation of accountability or delivery. Like religious faith, trust may exist in the absence of evidence to inform it. Trust involves the sense between the parties — an intuition — that the right thing, the promised proper thing, will in fact be done. At its core, trust is always relational and contextual. Trust is a form of implied contract, entailing the performance of a duty, the consideration for which may be little more than the continuation of that same trust having been already established.
Trust can be looked upon as an investment between two people. It may exist in one direction or be mutual. A trust relationship, once broken, is hard to regain. Often long in gestation and hard earned, trust can be breached in an instant. In most of us, trust has parallels with the American justice system in its implicit nature. Just as the accused are innocent until proven guilty under the law, in most cases, we grant trust until our collaborator gives us a reason to take it away.
Conflict Is Inevitable
By now we have learned that none of us can design or build much by ourselves. That’s why we do it in teams. We have also learned that the disciplines of design and building are highly subjective. While both a science and a business, creating built environments is more notably an art. As such, by intention, we give ourselves license to do almost anything in pursuit of our projects in teams. And that’s where the conflict comes in: With free rein to create, and with team members of different minds and experiences, values and goals, conflict is inevitable and is where trust enters the picture. In managing such endeavors, our challenge is to establish common goals, set limits and use proven management guiderails to keep us moving in a common direction and between our self-set lines.
Trust Required: An Admission
To explore the mysteries and powers of trust, let’s look at a spectrum of cases ranging from intrapersonal and intradisciplinary trust to larger-scaled trust among teams, and then, to extradisciplinary trust — that is, the kind that exists between us and those outside our clans.
Over the years I’ve learned the hard way to deploy management tools in leading creatives. Without a budget or schedule, how is the team to know when our work is due, our plan to accomplish it or how much we can spend? Answer: We can’t. But on too many occasions, even after creating and sharing these management tools, the real shock came when I discovered they still didn’t work. The question is: Why?
In each case I shared them with my teammates, the team of architects and engineers working with me to produce our design and documents. Or perhaps our contractor teammate had shared their budget and schedule with us, the design team. Then, we promptly ignored it, didn’t understand it or the tool simply failed us. Why did we slip into disarray so often? Because we lacked relational trust.
Let’s dig deeper to understand. In our excavation, let’s take the case where the contractor gives the design team a cost model to design to. We receive it in the meeting, publicly, with the owner. We even agree and commit to designing within said budget. And then we don’t. What happens? First, it’s likely that we will enter the exchange with an inherent mistrust of our construction management partner. Why? Possibilities abound. One might be that we were educated and accultured to nurture a healthy dislike for them in school. To wit, the stereotypical image and rhetoric of almost any modernist master architect and the accompanying sentiment about contractors as “foxes in henhouses” trying to “line their pockets” at the expense of quality or design. Another reason might be based on personal experience. Perhaps we had worked with them before and failed to meet one of their budgets. Either we had been responsible for over-scoping or over-designing or they had prepared an inadequate, underfunded project budget. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice: mistrust.
