I am interested in agile and agile techniques, so I do a bit of reading on subject. I ran across this blog post on "Trust". Really cool, I wish I had seen the session. It is interesting to look at the slides and get a quick overview of the session.

Agile 2007- The First Thing to Build - Trust on Agile Teams

One thing that struck me was a graphic on one of the slides that showed a cutout view of some land. It showed several layers, the bottom layer was trust and everything else was on top of that. Immediately I thought of a foundation, and how a strong foundation makes the building stronger and more resistant to weather and storms.  The next layer was commitment, and I can see how high performance teams need to be committed to one another and to the overall goals of the project.  The next layer was a surprising one, Conflict. I guess I just viewed conflict as the enemy, the storm if you will, but here it is viewed as one of the building blocks of teams.

When conflict happens, and it will happen, if it already has trust and commitment as a solid foundation then we can weather that storm. The next layer is creativity, I can totally see how we can be creative when we trust that our ideas won't be attacked.

It just made me think of the whole agile process in a new light. When someone makes a comment about a feature that they dislike it shouldn't be taken as a personal attack against the programmer. What is really happening is a compliment, "I am so glad we are using this agile process, and we can make necessary changes like this."

I haven't totally thought this through, but I had these thoughts so I had download "Windows Live Writer" to blog about this.