I have three statements / comments on the wall of my office.  Task & Purpose, So What?, and Repetitive Stupidity.  Often when people come in my office I will just point one out to them.  Sometimes they get it and sometimes they don’t.

Task & Purpose.  Yes, an army thing.  When you give me a task, tell me the purpose.  Am I trying to prove something one way or another, good or bad, making a recommendation, just providing information?  Tell me before I decide how to do my action.  Don’t me go off and spend a lot of time spinning my wheels when you have more info that would help formulate my purpose with the task.  In a previous job, this was never given to me and very frequently I had to do and redo the same job over and over again because I was told to “just do it.”  Even when I would ask, no additional info was given, because guess what, my boss then would not ask the question: Why?

So What? A great lesson from my old commander BG Red Brown.  You know how people will often come up to you and start spouting a bunch of information.  Their mouth is running 100 mph and most of what they are saying makes zero to little sense.  You have to sometimes say, “Stop, what do you want?”  Give me the BLUF (bottom line up front).  Why are you here?  What are you trying to tell me?  What’s the point?

Repetitive Stupidity.  Two things here, “Don’t make the same stupid mistake twice” and “Write it down if you have to do the same things over and over.”  If you have a task that has some amount of complexity to it or if you need to teach it to others and it needs to be consistent time and time again, “write it down.”  One of the hardest things I do these days on a frequent basis is to try and have processes or procedures documented.  I work for a fairly large company and many things need to be written down for consistency purposes and they aren’t.

Okay, one more.  “The Average Person is a Moron.”  This is not meant to be a derogatory comment, though it may sound so.  People will do the most unexpected things at any time.  Think of that drive into work.  You remember that driver that suddenly pulled over in front of you, “moron.”  Always think of the contingency plan for if that would happen.  They teach you that in defensive driving.  “Always expect the unexpected.”  The average person, and at times we all can be average, quite often does some stupid things, plan for it because, guess what, it’ll happen…