A Trustworthiness Methodology

Many project teams have adopted Agile or hybrid ways of working and still find themselves stuck in meetings, email chains and shifting priorities. Robert Snyder argues that the missing ingredient is not another framework but trustworthiness: teams that are competent, honest, dependable and benevolent, with decisions that are explicit rather than buried in conversation.

The session set out to give participants the courage and clarity to let go of conventions that undermine trust and to adopt a simple default way of working together, and a first step toward the wider adoption of a trustworthiness methodology in their own teams.

Robert Snyder argued that untrustworthiness in teams is widespread and should not be accepted, and that changing it is not complicated. He defined a trustworthy person or team as competent, honest, dependable and benevolent, all four at once. Missing any one of them makes them untrustworthy, and the result is activity rather than productivity.

The first part looked at conventions to unlearn:

• double standards and values that get only lip service;
• RACI matrices and org charts that separate authority from accountability;
• "verb sprawl", where work is described with dozens of loosely defined verbs;
• "conversation residue", where decisions live only in meetings and emails that are cheap to start but costly to repeat.

The second part offered what to learn instead. An "Expectation Factory" bundles decisions into a finite inventory, and each decision moves through five verbs: Draft, Review, Revise, Approve and Distribute ("DR. RAD"). Each step has a named owner and an estimated duration, defaulting to one day.

The session closed on leadership. Leaders are systematically intolerant of untrustworthy behavior, so it is noticed and the work reassigned quickly. In contrast to "climbership", they treat their team's trustworthiness as their responsibility.