Building Trust in Tech Part 2: A Focus on Intent

TLDR;

• Assuming good intentions is a great way to start building trust
• It is not an excuse to measure results, can be used to engage in discussions
• Double-checking your intentions is a great way to validate you are in line with your own integrity

Assuming good intentions is one of the fastest ways to kick-start building trust in other individuals.

When was the last time you looked internally at your own intentions? Are they focused on yourself or others? How does this get portrayed to others?

Breaking down Intention

Intent is a tricky concept in that it's impossible to figure out someone else's actual intentions. When the results are poor, we immediately begin to assume poor intentions.

When we truly begin to dissect what caused behaviors in the first place, what those intentions were, we are able to get a better understanding of ourselves and others.

Let's break intent down to three areas:

Motive

The motive that inspires the greatest trust is genuine caring

Your motive is your reasoning behind the action. It it selfish? or is it for the purpose of helping others? The best businesses are focused on making decisions which best help their users providing a service, and their stakeholders involved. The worst ones focus only on profits, not caring who they hurt along the way. Every action has a reaction, the question is are those intended reactions helpful or harmful to other individuals.

Agenda

The agenda that inspires the greatest trust is seeking mutual benefit

The agenda is focused on who wins? Stephen Covey in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People heavily covers the concept of the "win-win" scenario. If both sides, yourself and the one you are providing a service to do not walk away with a win, then the interaction itself is bad and needs to be rethought out to build trust.

Behavior

The behavior that creates the most credibility is acting in the best interest of others

Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less

- Rick Warren

Behavior is perhaps trickiest of these three focus areas, as this is now visible to everyone. Are we making it clear in how we behave that our motives and agendas are clear and for the benefit of others and ourselves? We want to make sure we showcase humility, where yes we want to showcase caring, but we also want to not deprive ourselves and only sacrifice.

Discovering your true intentions: the 5 Whys

The 5 Why Exercise has been used for a variety of reasons, from doing root cause analysis as part of incident investigations to identifying how to better describe user stories.

The concept is simple, though can also take some thought. Take a behavior you are doing, a thought you have, and simply ask "Why", and keep asking it. There is one catch: anything you say must be within your control, you cannot blame someone externally. Also of note is there is no guarantee you will get the same results each time.

For example:

• I want to write a blog on intent
• Why do I want to write the blog? I want to share my history with discovering how intentions have helped me find happiness in my growth journey and in understanding others.
• Why do I want to share? I hope this inspires others to discover and improve their own intentions
• Why do i want to inspire others to improve their own intentions? I want people to be happy and joyful in what they do and in their relationships.

There are probably 3-4 directions I could go with this chain, writing them down in this case helps me understand and motivate myself to do something outside of my normal comfort zone.

Communication of intentions

Intentions is something often missing within our communications within businesses and I believe even more so within tech as a whole. Whether is it requirements of a new feature or bugfix to reshaping the organization, if there are intentions they are too high of a level to understand the results.

Within any form of documentation, I have started focusing on communicating intentions first, what is the purpose of the document, or the purpose of the changes being proposed. Recently I got caught off guard when someone was asking me for a tech change which I thought I communicated well, so I took a step back and realized the intentions were completely missing from the documentation, and wrote an entire page behind it, defining the values I was focused on. This changed the perspective for all the stakeholders involved and built an insane amount of trust quickly.

Understanding others

While the 5 ways sounds like a great strategy to work with someone else, just asking "Why did you do X?" there is a foundational problem with it I learned a bit ago: The word "Why" immediately puts people on the defensive as it is seen as an attack, so you need to make sure you ask in a way to avoid that, and you should also make your own intentions clear as well. "I would like to understand how we got to this conclusion? I think I'm missing some context and would like to know more to help."

Never assume that others have the same intentions you do.

Summary

Make some time to think through your own actions. Were they selfless in helping others? Did you manage to focus on, find, and communicate a win-win?