Directions

There’s a fun little group activity I’ve seen used in a lot of settings. I used to think it was dumb and bad, but I’ve come around on it significantly, and I’ll explain why.

Here’s the exercise: at everyone’s seat is a face-down piece of paper. The facilitator will tell everyone to flip over the paper and then follow the directions on it. The paper will have a big list of directions, maybe 30 or so, and they’ll all be silly things like “stand up and clap three times” and “loudly proclaim your favorite color so the room can hear,” etc. The facilitator also (crucially) has to put a narrow time limit on it, something like: “You’ll only have three minutes total to complete all directions. Do as many as you can. Aaaand… go!”

But here’s the gimmick: The list is structured a certain way and has some specific instructions for numbers one, two, and thirty. Here’s what the list looks like:

What do you think happens? If you guessed “a bunch of people make fools of themselves,” you’re right!

A number of people in every group will basically ignore number 2 and will just start following the silly directions in numbers 3 through 29. They’ll see the big list and the time limit and just start rushing through, shouting to the room and spinning around and all that stuff.

Meanwhile, there will also be a certain number of people who scan the page like they should, see number 30, and smile smugly as their peers botch it. By the end, you’ll have made some people feel very smart and some people feel very foolish.

I used to hate this – I’d been a part of it several times in several different contexts (which of course, ruins it – if the trick works at all, it only works once) and I always felt like it was poorly used. As an arrogant young man, I thought, “If they’re not immediately firing everyone who messed this up, what’s the point? Those people just showed that they’re idiots.”

Now, I realize differently.

Being able to follow directions, especially complex directions in a time-pressured situation, is a skill. It’s a very valuable skill, but it’s not the only marker of intelligence. And because it’s a difficult skill, most people don’t naturally have it – they have to learn it.

This exercise really helped to hit home how important that skill is – and shattered the assumption that people were automatically good at it. If you messed that up, you were embarrassed but not harmed. That’s a good position to create the humility needed for learning.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned as I’ve aged is that almost every ability I thought was just “basic intelligence” was, in fact, a highly specific skill that I happened to possess and therefore I arrogantly judged people who didn’t. That doesn’t mean those skills aren’t very helpful and worth learning! It just means you shouldn’t judge someone for not having them yet.

The corollary, of course, is that there are plenty of those kinds of skills that I don’t possess. It keeps me humble and looking for them. Hopefully, you’ll do the same.