Instructions are supposed to literally tell us what to do. In the UK (possibly just England, it’s hard to keep up) we were recently told that instructions are even stronger than guidance. At the very least, you expect them to be sort of helpful in some way. However, we often find that instructions tell us more about the people who wrote them than about the task at hand.
You hope that instructions will help you with some sort of difficult or confusing task. Someone has gone to the trouble of writing them out, or drawing a diagram. They have been written by experts, who you believe are trying to help you – hopefully the experts believe that too. But the only time you seem to get unambiguous instructions is when the task is so obvious you don’t need them. So instructions often turn out to be either unhelpful or unnecessary – you start out with high expectations and they let you down.
I found out about unhelpful instructions from model aeroplane kits, and then they kept turning up in adult life: car maintenance manuals, Swedish self assembly furniture, anything remotely related to software etc. And let’s not forget instructions from the government, which can be about important stuff like how to stay alive.
Continue reading “What do instructions really tell us?”