The Boydian dictum, “People, ideas, technology; in that order”, itself runs on trust. True trust, however, is hard to build, tricky to sustain, and hard to come by.

The benefits here are most obvious when work gets intense. For example, Anthropic had a recent crunch time during which one of our teams was under intense pressure to quickly debug a very tricky issue. We were able to work on this dramatically more efficiently because the team (including most of the folks who joined the debugging effort from elsewhere) had high trust in each other’s competence; at peak we had probably ~25 people working on related tasks, but we were mostly able to split them into independent workstreams where people just trusted the other stuff would get done. In similar situations with a lower-mutual-trust team, I’ve seen things collapse into endless FUD and arguments about technical direction, leading to much slower forward progress.

Trust as a bottleneck to growing teams quickly | benkuhn.net ↗