We walked into a restaurant and requested a table for three. The hostess said she couldn’t seat us because there were none available. We looked around and counted seven empty tables. It was 8:30PM. I asked why we couldn’t sit at one of those.
“They haven’t been cleared,” she said.
“They look clean to me,” I replied.
“Oh,” she said. “I’ve been told not to sit people at tables that haven’t been cleared on the screen,” pointing to her podium.
“In other words,” I said, “You can’t seat us until the busboys release the tables even though they’ve been cleaned.”
“That’s about it,” she replied.
As Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up. Give people a menu-driven system and some will take its application to an extreme.
So what’s to learn from this? How often do you expect your people to use their common sense without verifying what their version of common sense looks like? It has become so easy to rely on the screen in making decisions. But sometimes this reliance obscures the bigger picture. Where does this happen within your organization and how can you address it?