This is an insight that struck me recently, though it’s hardly new. In fact, anyone working in marketing or public relations will tell you the same: people, as individuals, are intelligent. People in groups, however, can behave in very odd ways.
So how does this play out in the corporate world? It often comes down to the gap between how small groups of experts expect people to react and how large organisations know people actually react.
Take something as simple as installing software. If you give a set of instructions to technical experts or developers, they’ll follow them making intuitive choices along the way. Rarely will anything need spelling out. The target audience will just handle it.
Now compare that with giving the same instructions to the general public. Suddenly you need to specify every click, every option, every screen. What feels like minutiae to an expert is essential detail to ensure success for the rest of humanity.
Now you have this understanding, you can explain it to your experts as they will often wonder why corporate infrastructure demands such exhaustive, step-by-step detail. To the expert, it feels pedantic, even pernickety and pointless. But for a corporate support team, responsible for thousands of people with widely varying levels of knowledge it is just dealing with a very broad baseline of humanity.
Because in that large, mixed pool of users, someone will get it wrong. Someone will click the wrong thing, misread the obvious, or inadvertently cause chaos. And if support hasn’t built in the safeguards, they’re the ones left cleaning up the mess.
So next time you find yourself rolling your eyes at “silly” questions from corporate support, remember: they’re not being awkward. They’re working to a broader baseline of understanding, one designed to prevent the inevitable finger-pointing blame game from happening