A slightly more accurate anticipation of the CNH is:
people need to spend time learning a thing in order to coordinate around it. At the very least, the more time you need to spend getting people up to speed on a model, the less time they have to actually act on that model
people have idiosyncratic learning styles, and are going to misinterpret some bits of your plan, and you won’t know in advance which ones. Dealing with this requires individual attention, noticing their mistakes and correcting them. Middle managers (and middle “educators” can help to alleviate this, but every link in the chain reduces your control over what message gets distributed. If you need 10,000 people to all understand and act on the same plan/model, it needs to be simple or robust enough to survive 10,000 people misinterpreting it in slightly different ways
This gets even worse if you need to change your plan over time in response to new information, since now people are getting it confused with the old plan, or they don’t agree with the new plan because they signed up for the old plan, and then you have to Do Politics to get them on board with the new plan.
At the very least, if you’ve coordinated perfectly, each time you change your plan you need to shift from “focusing on execution” to “focusing on getting people up to speed on the new model.”
A slightly more accurate anticipation of the CNH is:
people need to spend time learning a thing in order to coordinate around it. At the very least, the more time you need to spend getting people up to speed on a model, the less time they have to actually act on that model
people have idiosyncratic learning styles, and are going to misinterpret some bits of your plan, and you won’t know in advance which ones. Dealing with this requires individual attention, noticing their mistakes and correcting them. Middle managers (and middle “educators” can help to alleviate this, but every link in the chain reduces your control over what message gets distributed. If you need 10,000 people to all understand and act on the same plan/model, it needs to be simple or robust enough to survive 10,000 people misinterpreting it in slightly different ways
This gets even worse if you need to change your plan over time in response to new information, since now people are getting it confused with the old plan, or they don’t agree with the new plan because they signed up for the old plan, and then you have to Do Politics to get them on board with the new plan.
At the very least, if you’ve coordinated perfectly, each time you change your plan you need to shift from “focusing on execution” to “focusing on getting people up to speed on the new model.”