Do you ever hear a concept and agree in principle, but don’t really grasp the implicatations until much later? I suppose that is what Tim Lister was alluding to in his recent London XP Day keynote: “people only hear what they are prepared to hear.”

Last March Ali Law from Vision Consulting gave us a talk at Agile Scotland on Trust. At the time I thought “yeah, but Agile is partly about establishing trust, isn’t it? We all knew that.”

Recently it has hit me that mistrust is the root cause of a massive amount of wasted resources in organisations. How much organisational bureaucracy is about checking up on employees and back covering; how much money is thrown at expensive consultants because managers don’t trust the views of their employees?

Rather than concentrating on reducing travel expenses or electronic storage costs, perhaps an organisation could benefit more from an explicit programme of building trust.