It’s like this: when we are first given a job within a large organization it is as though we are led blindfolded into a building. When the blindfold comes off, we find ourselves in a small white room with a door on each of two opposing walls. Hands reach through one door with raw materials to be processed. Different hands reach through the other door to take our finished product. If we are knowledge workers, the inputs and output are information. As we begin to work, voices through the delivery door yell at us when we don’t perform as they would like. We in turn shout instructions through the receiving door when they don’t provide us with appropriate raw materials. Admittedly, it’s not a great job, but it’s comfortable: they bring us snacks, and it pays the bills. Over time, we make friends with the people next door; we chat about our families and what we did for the weekend. But we have very little understanding of how what we do contributes to the overall output of the larger building.
One day a voice comes over a loudspeaker to tell us that we must do better. This presents a problem on several levels. For one thing, we don’t really understand what the building produces. Not really. Occasionally we receive postcards from people in offices with windows, telling us what they can see. But these communications are infrequent and contain little information, so our understanding of the ultimate output is fragmented and incomplete. And we don’t understand what goes on in all the other rooms between us and the outside, so we don’t really know how changes in our work will affect the final product. Our friends in the neighboring rooms don’t know any more than we do. This gap in knowledge is filled first by conjecture, which, as it circulates between the rooms transforms into superstition, then myth, then orthodoxy. Because of these challenges, we don’t really know what “better” is, so we focus on doing the plausible, rather than the effective: everyone look busy. I call this the dungeon entrance problem.