The myth of plausable deniability

Have you ever been in a status meeting, going over the action items. You get to one item, which is to call an organization/person and check on something. The person assigned to that task is asked to report on it. You ask him/her, "can you give me a status, it was due today." And the person says, Umm, oh yea, Right, I, umm I called them yesterday, but they weren't in and I got their voicemail, so I'm waiting for them to get back to me.

Hello? Lying? and the sad truth is, although it could be true, everyone knows it's not true. So why say it and insult the people at the table by lying to them and then thinking that they are buying the lie. I'm not sure what is worse.

Wouldn't you rather hear, "You know, I'm sorry, I completely vegged that and will call them as soon as I get out of that meeting and will email everyone the update on the task by the end of the day."

Now granted you don't want to hear that all the time, but otherwise you are perpetuating a lie, and that is no way to conduct a collaborative project. If it's OK to lie then where does that stop? If you can't trust each other, I guess you better get out the contract documents. And then you better get out the signed off Requirements docs and the User acceptance docs. OHHHHHH, is that where all of that comes from? Yeah, pretty much. If you don't trust people then you try to tie them down with documentation so that everything is crystal clear. But in reality, things change, and you don't always have time to document everything, why things changed, and get approval from 10 layers of management and contracts etc, for those changes.

But, if you trust each other, it's OK.

And how do you trust each other? You do what you said you were going to do and you DO NOT LIE. So if you tried to do everything that you said you were going to do and you failed, you admit it and try to move forward with lessons learned.

Come on now guys, we aren't 8 years old telling our Mom's we didn't break the dish that it just fell off the table by itself. Isn't it time we grew up an acted like professionals? Wouldn't that be refreshing?

Sorry Client X, I screwed up, This is what happened, this is why it happened, this is what I'm going to do to fix it and this is what I'm going to do to make sure it's not going to happen again.

Is it that hard? And which one as a client would you rather hear? OK I guess you can file that one under collaborative necessities of trust.

I have done it many times, I deleted the entire production database once, accidentally. As soon as I realized I did it, I sent an email out to a broad audience, explaining exactly what I had done. All that did was build trust because I was open when it was tough to be open. The client? made a joke about it and asked when the data would be back up.

Treat clients like adults and they might just act like adults!