Do You Know How to Follow Instructions?

There is an interesting experiment that has been around for a number of years. The purpose of the experiment is to determine how well you follow instructions. Your ability to pass this test is not dependent on your intelligence or the number of years you have been in school.

The test goes like this. The teacher hands you a piece of paper and tells you that this is a test. The only directions you are given is you have 15 minutes to complete the test and to read all the instructions before you start the test.

The piece of paper contains a list of 30 items. Remember, you only have 15 minutes to complete the test. Nothing is too difficult—things like “draw a square in the upper left hand corner of the paper” or “write your name at the bottom of the page.”

Most people, realizing they only have 15 minutes to complete the test will start to work immediately on #1, completely ignoring the second part of the instructions—read all the directions before you start. They diligently work their way through the list.

When they finally reach #30 they read the following: “Do not complete #1-29. Turn your paper over and write your name on the back.” That’s it. That was all they had to do. In their haste to complete what they thought was the entire test, they ignored the directions and, as a result, made the test far more difficult and time-consuming than it needed to be.

If you have ever had to work with people in a business, you know how even the simplest of instructions can be completed incorrectly. No matter how clear you try to make it, no matter how simple, someone always wants to do something different. They don’t read the directions.

The results of not following the instructions are usually an angry phone call from the person when what they were trying to do didn’t work and a large amount of your time trying to fix the mistake they made. This is an unfortunate truth of having to do business with people. You have to do business with people!

To keep yourself from going crazy (and wishing you could actually travel through the phone line to shake some sense into someone!), just realize that there are always going to be people that never learned how to follow directions. Nothing you can do is going to change them, so you either have to deal with it or change businesses!

It is impossible to design anything that is foolproof because fools are so ingenious. Anonymous

No system is so foolproof that it can't be brought to its knees by a well-intentioned novice. Anonymous

Every time we get it idiot-proofed, Ma Nature produces cleverer idiots. Robin Kinkead