Prescribed and discretionary trust

Specify where specifying is needed; trust everywhere else — and when things go wrong, do not drown good actors in prescription.

Every body decides, usually without noticing, how much of its life is written down as rule and how much is left to judgment. Prescribed trust is the written part: this is how we do this, in these words, because the cost of getting it wrong is high or the people doing it are new. Discretionary trust is everything else: do the wise right thing, and tell us what you did. Neither is virtuous on its own. All prescription produces compliant people who cannot act when the form does not fit; all discretion produces a body that cannot keep a promise twice.

It is load-bearing because of how the balance shifts under stress. A failure happens, and the reflex is to write a rule — and the rule lands on everyone, including the many who did nothing wrong and who now have less room to use their judgment. A few cycles of that and the body is governed by scar tissue. The discipline is to ask what the failure actually shows: sometimes a prescription is exactly right, and often the honest answer is a clearer agreement, a better set-up, or one conversation.

It is read in company with Guidance and Stewardship body: the stewards stay out of as much as they can, decide when they must, and push decisions back out as far as they will go and no farther. Experienced bodies can carry more discretion; new or mixed ones need more form until the form can be held.

Also called: where to specify and where to trust Stands on: Stewardship body · Subsidiarity · Zero Blame Environment Opens onto: Guidance · Project Management · Field of Agreements · Decision Records In play: table · Home Sources: The LIØNSBERG Operating System (book, draft v0) §16 · Project Management Hygiene (wiki root page, which makes the same point about experienced versus new teams) — lionsberg.wiki page name: The LIØNSBERG Operating System Open: The OS gives this a paragraph; no page develops it, and the balance is nowhere made measurable.