Uncovering how trust can hide bad processes and how the lack of Trust can kill the community

If you’ve spent time in ops, you know buffers. In factories, it’s safety stock. In project plans, it’s slack time. But for knowledge workers, where the “product” lives between our ears, the buffer sneaks in as something softer: trust.

I used to joke that I have a Sixth Sense for process debt. “I see dead processes.” They’re everywhere. One tell? When the team keeps copy-pasting the same thing in Excel and promises they’ll “clean it up next quarter.” I’ve shipped automations in less time than the manual workaround took once. That wasn’t a tech win. It was a trust reveal. People trusted heroes and habits more than they trusted the system.

Manufacturing solves the unknown with stock. Ford stacked buffer inventory to keep the line moving when reality got messy. Toyota couldn’t afford that. They built flow, not piles. One piece at a time, pulled by demand, problems exposed on purpose.

Translate that to knowledge work and “buffer inventory” becomes relationships. We ship with trust. “Toby will grab it.” “Chris always fixes it on Friday.” The board looks green, the dashboard hums — because a person is buffering what the process won’t.

Flip side: when trust is low, work stalls. Every handoff needs a meeting, a recap, a confirm. The line doesn’t jam from defects; it jams from doubt. Momentum dies in the queue.

That’s the paradox:

• Too much trust and you stop inspecting. The process looks fine while people quietly compensate.

• Too little trust and you stop connecting. The process can’t flow because nobody believes the next step will happen.

Both are process debt, just wearing different costumes.

The fix isn’t “more trust.” It’s a different trust, placed in the right layer.

1. 1) Zero-trust processes (design for flow, not heroics). Assume nothing gets done unless the system advances it. That means unambiguous inputs, visible work, and outcomes that prove the step happened. My favorite shorthand: prescriptive → ritual → report.

   1. Prescriptive: Define the “how” in the tool where the work lives.

   2. Ritual: Define the cadence and the success check (what must be true at each step).

   3. Report: Bake proof into the step. If it doesn’t produce a verifiable artifact, it didn’t happen.

2. 2) High-trust communities (safety for the humans, scrutiny for the work). People need a tribe to surface problems without losing face. That’s psychological safety, not process leniency. Reward the IC who finds the edge case. Give problems a home, a standard path for defects, exceptions, and learnings — so we don’t depend on “Friday fixes.”

3. 3) Make value visible. In SARBOX rooms, mapping input → transformation → output reveals who’s adding value and who’s orbiting it. In knowledge work, invisibility is the enemy of trust. Push work into channels where the output is inspectable by default: comments in context, linked artifacts, tickets that prove the change, and dashboards that show variance, not just volume.

4. 4) Promote the pull. Queue alone isn’t flow. Make the next unit unmissable and the completion definition inarguable. Work should “call” the next step with the minimum human interpretation required.

Process Debt Truth: Trust should cushion people, not processes — design systems that don’t need heroes, and build communities where heroes feel safe to tell you the system still does.