When I was in graduate school at the Media Lab in 1989, I had an officemate with a unique perspective on life. He was entirely cynical from a lifetime of wheeling and dealing, and at the time I was the picture of naivete. One day he told me, "John, when you're listening to someone, and they say to you, 'Trust me,' just replace every instance of their use of that phrase with 'F*ck you.'" My officemate explained that every time somebody asked you for their trust, that they were implicitly giving you the shaft. Ironically, I trusted my then PhD advisor who said to me, "Trust me," and I did. In the end I found that trust undeserved, and I dropped out of the Media Lab. Was my officemate right?
Today, while having a light dinner with a friend in the textile business, we talked about how trust is at the essence of any great enterprise. When everyone in an organization trusts each other, then politics are minimized and the pace of work can pick up enormously. However in the cynical world we live in, as I mention above, the idea of trust is often a fleeting and rare quality to find in the workplace. In the SIMPLICITY consortium we are currently studing this ever fragile concept of trust as one of the keys to realizing simplicity in technology. Some of the core precepts have emerged in our research, and we are gaining the necessary critical mass in our program to begin to make a difference. Will our efforts make the world any more bearable and inevitably simpler? Trust me.
Posted by maeda at October 27, 2005 07:43 PM