I agree that trust is a major component, especially from above. But it also requires a "team" mindset. The adhoc calls you are talking about are helpful for the

I agree that trust is a major component, especially from above. But it also requires a "team" mindset. The adhoc calls you are talking about are helpful for the team but they are disruptive to the person. This causes this approach to not work for some teams because there are people who just want to sit heads down and crank code. Those are the people that require daily stand ups to make sure they don't go off all willy nilly. These people also tend to get annoyed when someone else needs their subject matter expertise to fix/debug/tweak something as it is "interrupting" them. When the team evolves to value for team success over individual, then this sort of things is obviously more efficient because everyone is actively engaged in keeping everyone in sync. So I think it is much more about a mature and cohesive team than trust explicitly. However, ime, there are always some who just want to play whac-a-mole and be "done" even when it isn't in the team's best interest.