Trust, Faith, Collaboration, and Integration: DBIA's 10 Best Practices

"What's right" with our evolving industry? DBIA has just released its 10 Best Practices...a recipe moving forward for true 'integration' and collaboration', and a distinguishing of their individual purpose and practice.

How does one build trust?
I wrote a blog post about trust a few months back; I believe trust to be an unnatural act past the age of 4 or so. Unfortunately life teaches us this. Trust is built through 'performance'. If a person agrees to do something for another (promise), and in turn satisfies the promise (the results), then trust is planted between the two. If repeated reliably, then trust grows firmly. I believe only people can be trusted. Institutions can only establish a faith in their credo.


How does one build faith?
To borrow somewhat from Einstein, "Faith is doing the same thing over and over, and getting the same results." We can build faith in DBIA's 10 Best Practices of Design-Build through their thoughtful implementation. I believe the empirical evidence used to fashion the Practices recent establishment is testament to the faith owners and practitioners have with "Design-Build Done Right". After all, this is the source of their being. So owners, designers, and builders can have faith in the claimed results of Design-Build only if the practices are followed.

Trust is to Collaboration, as Faith is to Integration
Now, whom we choose to collaborate with, and how we establish the limits of said collaboration, are a function of trust. Stated differently, Only with trust can I place into the hands of my co-laboror the success of my efforts, my integrity, myself. Considering our collective history as an industry, this is a monstrous task for designers and builders, not to mention owners. I have faith in practices that reliably yield results, but I only build and nurture trust with people through which I have successfully "collaborated"... I call them friends.

To bring this full circle, I think many are trying to build "trust" through education. Education is how we begin to build faith in practices, individually drawing tidbits from our own experience. I can't teach you how to trust another...I can teach you "trust exercises" (those would be the DBIA Best Practices), but no one can bestow "trust" of another through education.

So, if one wants to do Design-Build... learn the 10 Best Practices, know the 10 Best Practices, use the 10 Best Practices, repeat the 10 Best Practices...to do otherwise denies establishing a faith in what they can yield. And while you are at it, you and your teammates will build trust through collaboration (that is if you don't change 'partners' every time the music stops).