In suppliers we trust

“When you form a team, why do you try to form a team? Because teamwork builds trust and trust builds speed.” Russel L Honore

I was recently lucky enough to attend a course given by Mike Lever, who I heartily recommend. In the session we covered a lot of ground but one thing that really stuck with me was when he explained the trust equation from Charles H Green.

Basically it got me wondering about trust in capital projects and the engineering and construction supply chains. The equation states that trust is the sum of credibility, reliability and intimacy over self-orientation (more on these later), so ask yourself do you trust your suppliers?

I’ve written in the past about the importance of collaboration on any project and I still really feel very strongly about it, collaboration is the manifestation of trust. So let’s break down the above equation with relation to the supply chain.

Credibility & Reliability — I’m going to lump these two together (because they’re easy) I would assume that you’ve picked suppliers who have these in abundance, you might be trusting your life to their equipment or designs after all. It’s safe to assume that they build their kit to any number of standards and have probably worked on countless projects before so I’m going to take these as a given for them to have made it to the bid stage even.

They may let you down with a late delivery to site or arguing over a change order but let’s assume they know their stuff and are good at it. I mean you wouldn’t just select them on price right?

So they’ve done it before, does that mean you trust them? Or is there more to it?

Intimacy — Now this is bound to raise a bit of titter, but go with it, do you know your suppliers, do they give you a warm fuzzy feeling of safety and security? Do you feel like you really know them? Do you feel like they would violate your faith in them and say sorry if things go south?

Self-orientation — I had to wait for this to be explained to me, I’m not going to lie, this refers to the person’s focus. In particular, is your suppliers focus primarily on him or herself, or on you and your needs? Do they want to solve your problem or get their package shipped and paid for?

Engineering projects despite their sometimes mind boggling size, price and complexity are about people not equipment. People make the kit, engineer, design and fabricate and produce the data and people trust people, not companies.

Any project can see your teams and suppliers disconnected and scattered all over the globe so how in a situation like this, if you’ll excuse the expression do you get intimate with them?

When I work with people as a consultant this is a philosophy that I try to extol really quite strongly, (I hope that people trust me now I think on it). I really do believe though that information management is a state of mind and that you should measure value by what your teams share rather than what they know. Sharing needs trust though and as we’ve established there are a number of factors to that.

On setting about building our first tool, Halcyon, this was a problem that we were looking to solve, how do we let your supply chain collaborate, how do you get intimate with them and work together on your information, how can you build trust into your information handover?

We hope that Halcyon answers those questions, because that’s what it’s for ultimately, trust and that trust has everything to do with people. We are launching Halcyon very soon and we are super excited about it.

If you’d like to see how to get more trust in your data then drop us a line.

Footnote: Slightly unrelated but my favourite quote about trust is from Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman, while touring CERN he came across a machine testing one of his own theories. Feynman asked how much the giant apparatus cost, upon hearing it was worth 37 million dollars, Feynman simply replied “You don’t trust me?”