When you know what is on the other side of that door, you no longer need to wonder.

If you’ve done the right thing and hired curious people, you should be aware that they will always wonder both why and how certain things work. This is a good thing, but sometimes, there’s a tendency in leadership to believe that information overload can stall people’s productivity, so the system becomes that of who needs to know. From my experience, this belief is typically the opposite of how things actually work.

An Anecdote…

A curious assembly worker’s job is to adhere paper labels to glass bottles. Lots happens before and after his particular station in the assembly line, but he’s particularly concerned with what happens after; he’s heard that all the bottles go through a rinsing process (both outside and inside) towards the end of the line. Since he cares about his work, thoughts of the paper labels, recently affixed to the glass bottles, getting wet and falling off during the rinsing process consumes his mind. As you can imagine, he begins to doubt whether or not the work he is doing is for nothing, becomes less focused, and ultimately less productive.

That is, until he bumps into his colleague at lunch who happens to run the rinsing station. Over lunch, the rinsing station manager comments on the slight dip in how well the paper labels are being affixed to the bottles recently. To which our label-affixer says, “Don’t you have to re-do them anyways after the rinsing process?”. “No”, the rinser responds. “At our station, the machine generates a plastic cover for the label prior to rinsing to protect it! The rinsing process must come after the label-affixation in order to clear away any excess glue or residue from the other stations before mine”.