You're stricter than you were told to be
Readtime: 3 minutes
Last week I told you I was ill.
Unfortunately, I'm still ill (now confirmed as Campylobacter food poisoning). It's gone on longer than expected, and the food I'm allowed is very bland. White bread, white rice, some chicken, and not too many fats.
The unexpected upside is white toast... I normally have brown bread, so white toast with butter on it feels like a bit of a treat. Except that I've been putting on only just enough butter so I can feel that there's some there.
I was thinking about this over breakfast this morning. If I put a bit more on, maybe 20 or 30% more, it would be so much tastier. And measured against the advice I was given for not too many fats, that difference is probably nothing.
It's a rounding error on a slice of toast.
But the interesting part to me was that nobody told me to minimise fats, just to go easy. What I was told and how I interpreted it were different.
(I appreciate this infection may be impacting my thinking… or making me think about certain things too much…).
Why the minimum is so appealing
I think the reason I did it is that the minimum is easy to defend.
If you push the edges of what you've been told is acceptable, you often have to be able to explain why.
If you sit nowhere near the edge, at the minimum, nobody questions it. You’re compliant. Which is comfortable, but it also means you've stopped making a judgement.
You've taken some guidance and turned it into a stricter rule.
At a senior level, judgement is more or less the thing you're paid for. Anyone can apply the strictest possible reading of a piece of guidance. The harder job, and the one you're actually there for, is working out how much of the wiggle room you've been given you should use.
It doesn't stop with you
The other thing I've been thinking about is what happens when your interpretation gets passed on.
Because guidance hardens as it goes down the chain of command.
Someone at the top says "let's be careful with spend this quarter". By the time it reaches the next level down, it's "no new spend without a business case". A level below that, it's "we're not spending on anything at the moment". And a level below that, someone isn’t allowed to buy the thing that would have made their job way more efficient.
Every layer adds a bit of its own margin, because being stricter than you were told is rarely something you get in trouble for. After three or four of those, you've got an absolute rule that nobody intended.
The person at the top would probably be surprised by it, if they ever heard, but they normally don't.
It gets worse over time
There's a second effect that I think is worse, and slower.
Whoever gave you the guidance built some slack into it, because they assumed some of it would get used. "Go easy" assumes you'll still put butter on the toast. "Be careful with spend" assumes you'll still spend where it matters.
When you take all the slack out, they can't see that you've done it. All they see is the result. So if they want a bigger result next time, they steer a bit harder. And you comply a bit harder still.
Do that a few times and the gap between what people say and what people hear gets pretty wide.
Most senior people have been trained out of gold-plating, and rightly so. Spending another three days on the final few per cent that nobody will notice is a waste of everyone's time (in most instances).
The butter example is at the other end of the same curve – the next level above the bare minimum is where nearly all of the noticeable difference lives.
The tricky part is that "don't gold-plate this" and "do the least you can get away with" feel like the same instruction when you're busy. The trick is knowing the difference.
There's probably a piece of guidance you were given recently that had a bit of room in it. What were you actually told, and what did you turn it into?
And remember, a little bit more butter is always good.
Thanks for reading.
Mostyn