Providing Good Instruction Manuals for Each Other
When we help others understand how to do something important to them, we always experience a multiplier effect. We feel better about ourselves and strengthen relationships with the people we help that might lead to us being helped in return. But we also start an exponential growth curve where our efforts and the efforts of the people we help get magnified. So let’s take the time it takes to show the patience and to give good the instructions others need. It’s bound to return rich dividends for everyone.
I mentioned a couple of weeks back that my old reliable Adirondack chair that I’ve been using for the past decade was on its last legs. Literally in fact: the chair’s legs were getting awfully precarious. And so since then I’ve been keeping an eye out for good deals on replacement. And I think I found a winner. There was a reasonably priced two-chair set that is made out of teak wood which is supposed to be a very weather resistant and solid hardwood.
And of course with all things that we ship in, the chair parts came in a large box with letters indicating the various parts, a bag full of various screws and bolts and wrenches, and an instruction manual. I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’m not a very handy person. I might be decent and many other things, but I know I’m not terribly mechanically inclined. I so appreciate and respect people who are—who can build things from scratch. But for me, I am always grateful for those instruction manuals.
I do a fair amount of technical writing including giving instructions for things like successful recreation on forest lands. And so I pay close attention to the quality of the instructions in those manuals. Some do a wonderful job of describing steps in pictures and in conversational language that are easy to follow. And others fall short in some ways. The particular manual for putting together my chairs seemed decent enough. It offered pictures in a few basic steps and described the steps well to a point. But then I ran into a bit of a puzzle.
The manual only showed the steps to one side of the chair, so after I completed one step on one side, I moved directly on to the next major step which required moving to a different section of the chair entirely. I reasoned that maybe there’s a reason why it was asking me to only put in screws on one side since I’ll connect the other side later on. But skipping ahead, I realized that the connecting of the other side never gets described in the manual. So I had to backtrack a bit and assume that the writer of the manual thought it too obvious that I would have to repeat the steps on the other side to include that instruction in the manual.
And I got the chairs put together and they seem quite solid at least by my building standards, so things ended well. But it’s made me think about the value of giving thorough and good instructions. One of my favorite parts of my job is alleviating the stress that my coworkers often experience when trying to figure out digital tools. It’s almost magical to see how much of a lift a few minutes-worth of a good walk through can give them, and the truly amazing thing about being able to provide that instruction is that once my coworkers know how to do something they 1) no longer waste valuable time searching for tutorials or wading through platforms, 2) don’t have the highly frustrating experience of needing to use a tool but not have the knowledge or resources to use it effectively, and 3) can then gain the power of the digital tool and often they come up with remarkable products that help a lot of people.
When we help others understand how to do something important to them, we always experience a multiplier effect. We feel better about ourselves and strengthen relationships with the people we help that might lead to us being helped in return. But we also start an exponential growth curve where our efforts and the efforts of the people we help get magnified. So let’s take the time it takes to show the patience and to give good the instructions others need. It’s bound to return rich dividends for everyone.