Looking back at some courses I taught in 2015, I noticed that I had been teaching the lean principle of respect for people using these 4 pillars:
- Develop skills; give authority.
- Assume good faith.
- Create space to share ideas, problems, wisdom.
- Show how today’s work fulfills the organization’s purpose.
It’s #2, ‘Assume good faith,’ that I’m no longer comfortable with.
Two things this misses
- The idea that people are conditioned to behave in certain ways, and that there are causes underlying behavior. This is true for behaviors we need more of (e.g. thoughtful collaboration) as well as those we must extinguish (e.g. discrimination, cruelty).
- The reflection that causes and conditions of individual behavior run impossibly deep. All of the hurt in the entire world is contained therein. We move through the same process of dependent origination. Most of that motion occurred across lifetimes, before everybody came to work or into being. What we can still do—today—is work our asses off to produce better conditions, with kindness.
My regret
I regret recommending that people ‘assume good faith’ as a way of enacting respect for people. Why? Because it assigns extra work to the person dealing with whatever trash someone else has handed them. It opens a door through which a bunch of sexist and otherwise awful shit enters. It tolerates behavior and hides problems that are intolerable.
A huge part of the project of lean is to fix problems at the source. The exhortation to ‘assume good faith’ sets us up to do precisely the opposite.
I am grateful for I could not care less about your positive intent, a short, illuminating article from Lauren Howard that clarified the situation.
And I’ll keep working at a better articulation of a principle I believe in, but have only clumsily expressed.