The best way to give directions – destination first

Many of us have to give directions; it might be in a project, when managing a team, instructions for someone to pick something up for you from a shop, defining a business strategy – but the way to give directions is important.

What is wrong with the way people are directed?

In a recent ‘disagreement’ on the topic, I used the following analogy about how many people give directions to a location;

  Leave this building by the front door, locate your vehicle and start the engine, drive out of the car park and turn right onto the main road, avoiding oncoming traffic. When you leave from here, go straight for about half a kilometre, then turn left, continuing for another 2 kilometres, turning right at the BP service station and then at the fourth left, turn and look for your second left turn and you have arrived.

So, let’s consider the alternative;

  You are heading to 12 Privet Drive, a white house with a blue door. You can get to the house from White Hart Lane, which is at the junction of Main Street with a petrol station and McDonalds on the corner. Main Street is a left turn from the street we are on now.

In the first example, commonly used as a technique to give directions, there is a heavy emphasis on the early steps, and each point is prescriptive and must be followed exactly. If the traveler misses a waypoint – or if the person giving directions has made an error – then there is no way to find the destination other than to keep retrying the steps. With the focus on the initial steps, if the traveler knows a “better way”, they may choose to take their preferred route, or they may simply tune out on the parts that they consider obvious. If there is a difference of interpretation (for example, the “fourth left” – does this include the unsealed dirt road or not?) or a change to a waypoint (the BP has closed down or been replaced by McDonalds), then the traveler has to ask for more direction. If the route is unavailable, then they cannot find another way – if the prescriptive route is inefficient, then they can’t do it any better.

In the second example, the destination is defined explicitly and with further clarification to allow recognition of a correct arrival. Waypoints are defined in reverse order so that if the traveller knows a waypoint then they can use their own knowledge and skill from that point on to find the location – why do they need directions on how to leave their current location and get to Main Street? If the traveller knows the location of the McDonalds on White Hart Lane, they can use their existing knowledge to go straight there.  The traveller is able to choose their own route if they know the destination – which may be quicker or more economical.

The best way to give directions

This analogy applies to team managers, project managers, strategists and really anyone else who is expressing their wishes to someone else. Define the overall goal, and a way that people can identify if they have correctly reached the destination, enough information so that if they leave the defined path that they can return to it either by themselves or from someone in the vicinity.

Over-prescriptive instructions can also waste time! In a technology scenario – if you start giving step-by-step instructions on how to install Windows Server for example, but the person who you are describing it to already has a pre-installed VM template, then you could risk the person ‘tuning out’ and not following an important part of your directions. They may also feel that your directions – for something they have done before – is not an effective or efficient way to reach the next step.

Don’t give step by step prescription of what needs to be done if you don’t want people to keep coming back to you for further directions. During a project or task, objectives may change along the way, there may be roadblocks that alter the intended path – but if people know the final destination, then they will be more able to cope with these changes. Let people use their intelligence, skill, and even creativity to reach the goal that you have defined, and they may even exceed your expectations!

By overly focusing on the initial steps, this can cause an invalid attention on the wrong part of the directions – instead of on the destination. The initial steps of the directions may be obvious to the person who you are giving them to, or they may disagree on the initial stages, or things may change (in the analogy, road work, closed roads, or traffic).

To take the analogy and apply it to a project – a focus on the final outcome will allow people working on the project to ensure their efforts achieve that outcome. A compartmentalised work package that gives no awareness of how the work package fits into the overall completed project, could be both inefficient and problematic. In a strategy, a focus on activities that are required to fix today’s problems (the initial steps) does not deliver in what it needs to achieve – a strategy should focus on a final destination!

The worst way to give directions

Interestingly, I have come across some who give direction in a peculiar way; negative directions. This can be very detrimental and demoralising for those involved; a statement of “don’t go down this way, and then don’t go that far” only focuses on the negative, limiting factors. Of course it is important to learn from your mistakes, but the demoralising focus on negativity does not help anyone.

Everyday example

Have you ever had to call your Internet Service Provider, and have them tell you that you need to reboot your modem? I bet they don’t just tell you to reboot your modem – they will give you step-by-step prescriptive instructions of looking for the box with lights on it, looking for the thin round power cable that is plugged in to it, tracing this to the wall and then unplugging the cable. Once you have done this once, the step-by-step instructions can get frustrating – particularly if they are not telling you what you will end up doing! Take this as an example of how to not tell people what to do a task…