I was intrigued, and then, dismayed after a pit stop in a chain gas station on a trip to North Carolina. Attached to the inside of the door of the women’s restroom was a large, laminated poster – proudly outlining the 12 steps for cleaning said restroom. At first glance, I was thrilled that the establishment took this so seriously, as I really like clean public restrooms. However, a deeper look, gave me a touch of disbelief first and then a reminder of my despair about our education system.
Upon deeper review of the poster, I noted that the 12 steps were actually more like 30 steps, as each of the 12 steps had up to 6 additional steps. OK – so perhaps there are actually 30 steps to a clean bathroom, who am I to quibble with being thorough?
Then I noticed that, in order to help their staff do their job, the creator of the poster had kindly helped people with photos to differentiate between a mop and a bucket and a paper towel dispenser. Really?
At that point, I had to wonder. Did they really have staff who did not know what a bucket was? Or a mop handle? Or gloves? Or a wet floor sign?
And if that was the case, how does make the leap from needing to name and identify basic cleaning implements to following a 30+ step process that requires reading and following directions? And if you could read and follow all of the 12 steps – do you really need a poster to tell you that 
the final step is to re-open the restroom? Were they experiencing times when employees, after cleaning the loo, remained inside, unable to understand that they should let customers enjoy the fruits of their labor?
I suspect that the helpful corporate employee who came up with this idea did so with the best of intentions. As do all the other educators, from pre-school to grad school, that want to help by providing step-by-step directions and outcomes to problems large and small.
Just a few days earlier, I had asked my Purdue students to provide me mid-semester feedback on their experience. And just as I hear every semester, the students shared with me that this was the first class that they’ve had that required them to think and problem solve. The first one where there was not a rubric that had all the answers in neat and tidy order. The first one that showed them that there might be more than one way to accomplish good things (or fail in ways large and small) and that life was messy and complicated, and no turn-by-turn navigation is available.
So, as much as our education systems and misguided educators would like to believe that they can teach folks to follow step-by-step processes and therefore prepare them for the correct answers, it is far better to spend that time and energy on teaching basic skills, critical thinking, and helping students learn to navigate in our complex, messy world. I suspect 99.9% of them are fully capable of knowing that the final step is to open the door – and that they would be much better equipped to step out and into the world as a result.
2 Responses
My first thought was the Continuous Improvement folks improving the bathroom cleaning process had forgotten some basic principles of writing work instructions:
– Keep detail to the what’s and how’s that are critical to achieving low variation and waste in the activity. This requires knowing the parts of the activity that are most likely to result in unwanted variation and/or waste.
– Detail dependent on the knowledge and skill-level of the individuals that will be using the instructions. More skilled, less detail required. Writer needs to understand who will use the instructions – are we talking about teenagers, immigrants for whom English is a second language, or 60-year old grandmother’s?
– Detail dependent on frequency of use; more frequent, less detail; less frequent, more detail. The assumption being that the more you do the activity, the more you know and remember howt o do it.
If situation requires, Listen, then think. Okay, so I do too much “drive thru”….
You start to wonder how lacking our education is that we have to put “contents hot” on our coffee cups and hundreds of people under 21 can’t make change even when the cash register tells them how much. Isn’t part of common core how to read “technical manuals”??