Trusting a Process

How would you react if someone you barely know asks you to trust them to get an important work done? Do you trust them Or tell them ‘nah.. let me do it myself’? This happened multiple times with me. When someone asks you that, it is a statement of confidence – either on a process or him/herself – or the guy has no clue on what he is committing. Several years ago, in Infy, one guy asked a group of 20 ppl to trust the process of a streamlining an activity. We did. But the results were poor.

Every time I go to a new gym, the instructor is all enthu to teach you. Some force you to follow what they teach. I had this experience when a friend of mine and I asked the instructor to get out of our way because we saw little value in what he told us. And typically, this enthu will evaporate in a couple of days and we are an auto-pilot after that. Instructions come on pull-basis. Sometimes, you have to pull real hard. But not when I visited this new gym a couple of days back. It has far more instructors than usual. ISB gym had one instructor or at times two. But here, the member-instructor ratio seemed close to 1:1. When a trainer approached me, I told him that I am familiar with a gym and that I can manage. He was polite and understanding. He told me my ‘schedule’ will be ready in a day. What? Will the gym lay down a schedule for me? Before I left that day, I saw a member taking a signature from the instructor on a printed card which looked like a calendar. Man, far from being do-it-yourself gym, it is a ‘we-will-treat-you-like-a-kid-but-will-get-you-what-you-want’ one. I blinked it. There is the signature of a trust worty process. The instructor then asked me to exercise in a variety of ways including a sit-in-the-air (of course on my legs) (or Baithak) exercise and forty minutes on a thread mill (as opposed to the 25-minute-4-km run I prefer). No wonder all my body is aching. I think that is the flipside of trusting a process. ;) I feel like Monalisa. It’s aching but I am still smiling.

The gym episode has good lessons for me. I am involved in an activity that requires me to design processes in a research organization. The processes should be scalable, person-independent and ensure quality and timeliness of research. The process should enable the organization to reuse knowledge generated within the company to ensure consistent quality that users need. Such processes are a sine-qua-non to build good companies. I hope to learn a bit about designing good processes.

Life is a process for mitchdolittle

DetriotGirl, an English teacher, wants her students to trust the learning process

What trust a process means to a creative professional