 Trust is cheaper than control. I've been saying this for a while, and this fellow, Jeremiah Aoyang, has very nicely been quoting me saying it, and I've been wanting to elaborate. I've been wanting to respond so that we could both kind of go deeper on the topic, and it turns out the topic's pretty deep and chewy and complicated. So I'm gonna take this in part starting with comparing control and trust. So that's this presentation here. We'll start with something we all pretty much know. Stoplight, this is a technology of control. Not that controversial. When the stoplight fails to stop us or when accident rates go up, we escalate. We add cameras, we add radar guns, we send automatic tickets in the mail or over email. We just sort of keep cranking up the knob and trying to make people obey these technologies of control. Inside companies, we have policy manuals, some of which are really detailed down to the last everything that happens. In manufacturing systems, sometimes there are work process designs that are very, very technical. Or there are simple things like vacation requests, figuring out what goes when, where we go, when we can go places. There's also people who have to punch in, clock in my first job at Disneyland in Anaheim. I had a card that I had to punch in and punch out every day. I would get docked for a 10th of an hour. They kept military time if I was three minutes late to my dock position. Things like that. So this is definitely a technology of control. And then here's a school room. This seems innocent enough, but this room is completely full of technologies of control. What do I mean? Well, there's a clock on the wall that says when we're all supposed to be in our seats. We have grade levels so that everybody in this room, except the teacher, was born pretty much within 12 months of each other. The teacher takes roll at the start to make sure that everybody's actually in the room. When anybody needs to leave the room, they need a hall pass or an excuse from their doctor or their parent. We give them grades. In fact, the teacher gives them grades, which are a standardized way of controlling who's learned what and where that we move on. That is our record of what on earth we know. We all kind of know that that's not really a good record, but we reinforce this with standardized tests, which are a mechanism for controlling who gets into a particular school who moves on to higher levels from there. In this classroom, in many classrooms, particularly in the compulsory public education systems, they can only read from approved texts. The school boards dictate. In fact, the Texas School Board dictates for half the school boards in the country. What texts are allowed in the rooms? There's not a lot of freedom of what's there. And then post-columbine, we now have a lot of surveillance in schools. Schools are very, very afraid of shooters. Never mind Sandy Hook and so forth. This is really a created terror in the school system. In class, the teacher is God, whatever the teacher says, goes, and a strange thing has happened, which is we've militarized schools. Between the surveillance and everything else, SWAT teams get called into schools, disturbances that normally would have been something that went to the principal, now turn into criminal records for youths, for juveniles, all kinds of bad things have happened. If you wanna see more about where this has gone, look at the documentary, The War on Kids, which blew my mind. So that's a pretty depressing picture I'm painting. I'd love to describe to you some really viable alternatives that are based on trust. These are alternatives that exist today. So instead of the engineering artifacts that define how we design and implement traffic at intersections, I'm gonna describe something called traffic calming. Instead of policy manuals and all the affordances of control of employees, I'm gonna talk about different ways of trusting your employees. And then instead of the compulsory school system and all of its control mechanisms, I'll describe something at the other end of the spectrum called unschooling that depends on trusting kids to be curious and wanna figure things out. This is a still from a video that's on YouTube of a town called Pointon in the UK. This is the before picture. Notice that there are two lanes of cars at a stoplight at one side, not a lot going on in town and it's sort of ugly. And of course, anytime you renew a town, it's going to look better. But what they did to Pointon is they implemented traffic calming. They basically created a roundabout, in this case, strangely, a double roundabout where traffic always flows, like blood corpuscles in your arteries that always in motion, half the people are not waiting at one light. And that's interesting and the town certainly looks more beautiful now. But what's really interesting is that, and if you listen to the video, you'll hear this, they actually got back their city. Their foot traffic increased, people felt comfortable walking around downtown. The stores prospered, they got some community back as a measure of implementing traffic calming. One of the people who helped bring about traffic calming is this fellow Hans Mondermann, who was a Dutch traffic engineer, whom I met in 2006 after he had already implemented this in some 120, 30, 40 cities across Holland. He was really lovely and gave me a walking and driving tour through a couple towns that he had implemented traffic calming in. One of them was in Drachten. I posted several videos, 10 videos of that tour on YouTube way back when, they still get used quite a bit. His domain of course is street planning, urban design, traffic, and he would never go in a new town to the traffic engineers because they know exactly how to build streets. You put a light here, you paint the line there, you put a sign here, you add a radar gun. He actually had a very heretical way of doing this where he went to the city planners, other people, and he gave them tours of other towns where he had already done this. His heresy was that he was trusting people to make their way across intersections without killing one another. Pedestrians, bicyclists, drivers, truckers, the whole thing. So he was designing for eye contact. He wanted everybody to have to slow down enough to make eye contact and time their way through the intersection, which is really efficient. So this is called traffic calming or shared spaces. And then if I switch to this notion of the workplace, my favorite example on the globe is Ricardo Semler, the president of SEMCO, which was founded by his father, who appears to have been a real Type A, Type X kind of a standard issue manager who had a company that had all sorts of control systems in place. And Semler has a series of great videos on YouTube. There's a really nice TED talk that he finally did, but there's a series of longer interviews where he tells stories, including one where early on when his father took ill and he came back to the company, Semler as a kid was a surfer and a musician, did not want to inherit his dad's company, that sort of ended up happening. But then he came into the company and landed in a union negotiation with two union reps, one of whom turns out to be Lula, Luis Ignacio Silva da Lula, the guy who becomes the president of Brazil later on. And in these negotiations, they're talking about the five minute grace period that workers have after they punch in, they clock in, they have five minutes to get to their post and still be considered on time. And somewhere along the line, Semler gets the instinct to just get rid of the entire time control management infrastructure and just try to say, look, we want this work done, we want you to sort out how it's going to happen. And it took the union reps he was talking to more than four months to figure out that he was actually not lying. He wasn't trying to trick them out of the five minute grace period. He was trying to trust the workers and he then proceeded over the next couple of decades to implement a series of things where SEMCO, the company, is now democratic and full of trust at all sorts of different levels from scheduling and so forth on down to workers, set their own salaries and bonuses, but they also have open books for the company. So they know that if they take too much out of the company, the company won't exist next year. Now it's hard to have open books when the CEO is making 50X or 100X what the least paid employee is making or maybe more. So maybe that indicates that fairness has a role to play here as well. So this is in the domain of management. He's been trusting his employees. These kinds of strategies go under different names like democratic workplaces, co-determination, also things like holocracy, wirearchy, wholearchy, there's a variety of variants of this you'll see experimented in the workplace. Netflix has a vacation policy. For example, it says there is no policy. We don't do any tracking. There's also no clothing policy at Netflix but nobody comes to work naked. The lesson is you don't need policies for everything. Then unschooling. We're all pretty familiar with school. Most of us went to schools and survived. We made it through. We got our credentials. We moved on up through the ladder. And at one point, some 20 years ago, I got an article put in front of me. Doc Searle sent me a magazine called The Sun that had a reprint of an article called The Six Lessons School Teacher by John Taylor Gatto, the guy pictured at the bottom here. And I read that. And Gatto was basically saying, look, nominally I'm your English teacher but there's a hidden curriculum in school and here's what I'm doing. I'm teaching children obedience, dependence, and all sorts of other bad things that they really shouldn't be learning because they were born curious. And what unschooling says, and there are many proponents, Grace Llewellyn, John Holt, Paolo Freire, Ivan Illich, a whole series of people I could point you to to learn more about it. They're basically saying, look, you can trust children to be curious and to want to figure out what their role is in life. That's what they're all about. Just watch any five-year-old. So what if you had an infrastructure, minimal infrastructure that allowed that to happen? So they're working in education and learning. Their heresy is, hey, maybe we should trust the young folk. This is called unschooling and or free range children or it goes by a series of different names. But for me, it's a really inspiring way of talking about trust. I've been talking about only three sectors of human activity. Other sectors are just as bad. They're just not as much fun often to talk about, but governance, politics, policy diplomacy, the war on drugs, how we police and enforce laws, healthcare, gender, sex, and love, parenting, all of these areas are full of control mechanisms that we don't really notice. We take them for granted. So trust is cheaper than control. This is just the first section comparing control and trust. The next section is going to talk about the costs of control. All of this is part of a prezzy mini-documentary-like thing, a transmedia experiment called on trust, which is part of a larger thesis I call the relationship economy. For more, go to GerryMakulski.com or subscribe to this channel. Thanks very much for listening.