It Is Water
In 2005, David Foster Wallace gave a now-famous commencement speech at Kenyon College. Known now as “This Is Water,” the speech started with a parable: “There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way. The older fish nods at them and says, ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ The two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’”
One of the hardest things about talking about our company values is that they’ve become so deeply ingrained, and are so much a part of how we see our work and the world, that it’s hard to know them by name. Trustworthiness is something that we don’t build —we hire for it. We don’t have to discipline it into the team. It’s a value that Mallory, Katie and I hold dear, and it has to be in the DNA of our developers and project managers values in order to successfully work with us. Trustworthiness is the center of it all.
It’s an extension of openness, it’s in support of collaboration, it’s the core of joy and it’s the most important ingredient in creating a caring environment. It is water.
From the moment a client joins the WOTW cinematic universe, we try our best to be reliable, consistent and supportive. It’s baffling to me when we hear about other providers missing deadlines, inflating costs, and evading emails, because those things are so corrosive, so damaging to the environment of trust that has to exist to make positive and fruitful collaboration possible.
Establishing trust early on has another essential result: the ability to conquer roadblocks together. When you know that your creative partners are coming to challenges with their best intentions, you can listen to their concerns and feedback without expecting that your designer is saying no for no reason. When you trust your team, you can take their feedback in mind with the context that they want you to be successful.
Trustworthiness isn’t the opposite of imperfection. In fact, trustworthiness is what makes snafus and challenges solvable, and at our core, what we do is solve interesting problems. Trust is the essential ingredient for respect and a crucial aspect of security, which we’re always striving to give our clients and our team. By the time clients are done working with us, our hope is that they’ve been able to relax into a relationship of mutual trust — so much so that launching their project makes them hesitant to leave the WOTW cinematic universe.