You can say "good job!" in response to mediocre work. You can say thanks for simple interactions that are just people acting as expected. You can build a cultur

You can say "good job!" in response to mediocre work. You can say thanks for simple interactions that are just people acting as expected. You can build a culture where trust is both expected and repeatedly acknowledged. I think there's a lot to be found in some of the business practices we've cast off, like firm handshakes and business cards - they matter as simple acknowledgements. Literally, just serving the same purpose as a TCP ack. "I'm still receiving you, go on". Distributed systems rely on a lot of tradeoffs about how often you reconcile state and how much you expect the other parties to have successfully executed on what they say they have. Human relationships are a vastly more complicated distributed system than we've otherwise imagined.