One of my favorite connections on LinkedIn, Mr. Mahesh Shastry, posted this reminder of a guiding principle of the tech industry:
In the 1990s, begging forgiveness was a secret superpower. Not everyone knew the approach. Those who applied it understood that to beg forgiveness, they were obligated to deliver something more amazing than they could have by asking permission first. Imagine a plumber you’ve called to your home to fix a low water pressure problem while you’re at work and unreachable that day.
I’m sorry for digging up your lawn and leaving it all a mess. I had to fix the leaking portion of the pipe.
That’s no good!
We had to dig up your lawn to find and fix the broken water pipe. We replaced the old pipe from the meter at the street up to your home. We installed fresh sod to repair the grass area. Please give it some extra water the next couple of weeks.
He did what he had to to fix it right and not leave a mess.
When begging for forgiveness was a new thing, we did it with confidence, knowing that in the end, we would delight the customer. Sometimes we’d have a difficult customer, and this approach was the only way to get them on board. We risked disapproval because failure was not going to happen. Even if we did fail, the worst case outcome was that we lost a customer. There are plenty of customers.
This brings me to trust. When you called that plumber, you may not have had any experience with him. You needed a problem fixed, and you weren’t available to supervise. You needed to trust him to do the right thing. Trust here, was not earned, and certainly not hard earned. It was granted because there was no reason to distrust. Until he didn’t fix the whole problem and left your lawn all dug up.
In transactional dealings, trust is assumed and distrust is earned. Trust becomes the lack of distrust, or the negative space of distrust. The concept of negative space comes from photography and other visual arts. It’s best explained with an example. Have you ever noticed the arrow between the E and the x in the FedEx logo? It’s no Bob Ross happy accident!
If you had never noticed that, you’ll never not see it again. And this is what I want to point out about trust.
When that plumber shows up, he shows up with a blank canvas. That blank canvas is the negative space of distrust. You have no reason to expect disaster, and every reason to expect he will fix the problem correctly and adequately. If he’s able to tell you what he is doing every step of the way and completes each subtask successfully, that canvas of distrust stays blank. But when you get home to see the mess in the yard and the problem not really fixed, the canvas comes to life, and those empty areas of trust are gone and forgotten.
Let’s look at an example where trust is earned, where it is the positive space. Your teenage kid wants to borrow your car for an unchaperoned overnight road trip for a concert with his friends.
Don’t you trust me?
No. You don’t. That’s the point. Trust is not the negative space here. Trust here is built from experience, preferably at a slower and more deliberate pace than driver’s license to unchaperoned road trips in less than a year. You can see potential for a bad situation leading to a bad outcome.
Be thankful your kid didn’t see his worst case outcome as losing a customer and just ask for forgiveness when he got home.
My hope for today is to identify these two ways of looking at trust to set the stage for an article on AI agents. If we insist on them having permission, we may never be able to start automating. But if we let them beg forgiveness, we’re in for disasters in short order.
The featured picture is a collaboration between Grok and me.
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