When the Instructions Let You Down

Picture this. You’re working a shift, and you notice something that needs updating — a digital display, a menu, a sign. Maybe there’s a typo that’s been quietly embarrassing the business for who knows how long, or an outdated price that a customer is about to notice before you do. You know it needs fixing. You are a capable, motivated person who would like to fix it.

So you pull up whatever instructions exist, and you start following them. And somewhere along the way, you hit a wall. A step that assumes you know something you don’t. A screenshot that doesn’t match what’s actually on your screen. An instruction that says “update the file” without mentioning where the file lives, what it’s called, or what software opens it.

You try a few things. Nothing works. You look for someone who might know. That person isn’t in right now. So the typo stays. The outdated price stays. The thing that needed fixing doesn’t get fixed, and it won’t get fixed until someone who knows the process happens to be available — which might be today, or might be next Tuesday.

This is not a story about a bad employee. This is a story about bad instructions.

Here’s the thing about poorly written instructions: they don’t announce themselves as poorly written. They look like instructions. They have steps. They might even have screenshots. But if they were written by someone who already knew the process inside and out, they were almost certainly written with invisible assumptions baked in — details that felt too obvious to mention, context that the writer didn’t realize they were skipping, jargon that means something specific to someone who’s been doing this for years and nothing at all to someone who hasn’t.

The staff member following those instructions isn’t failing. They’re navigating a document that was never really written for them.

And the cost of that moment is easy to underestimate. There’s the immediate problem — the thing that didn’t get done, the delay, the customer who noticed the typo before it got fixed. But there’s also the quieter cost: the employee who tried, hit a wall, and now feels a little less confident, a little less capable than they did an hour ago. That feeling accumulates.

The good news is that this is one of the more solvable problems in a small business. Instructions that work for the person following them — not just the person who wrote them — are absolutely achievable. The most important step is also the simplest one: before you finalize any set of instructions, have someone who doesn’t already know the process try to follow them. Not to test the employee. To test the instructions.

You’ll find out very quickly where the gaps are.

Have you ever been the person stuck following instructions that just didn’t quite work? What was the moment you realized the instructions were the problem, not you? Let me know in the comments!