What you don't see, doesn't exist

There are many things that happen on the shop floor that the managers don't know about. For those managers, those things don't exist. They think they know what's going on, but they're working with incomplete, and possibly erroneous information.

Sometimes that's a good thing, and the people doing the work keep their ways of working quiet to avoid meddling. Eventually, though, the manager may issue some guidance that conflicts with the reality of the work. Perhaps they insist on some extra work that doesn't affect the work being done. In the manager's mind it may enhance the current work, but in the workers' minds it's just a dead end. Perhaps they presume some stage in the current process can be built upon, thereby implicitly requiring work to create that presumed stage. Either of these two cases can add work, and therefore cost to the work process, and likely make the workers' lives miserable. Worse yet, they may insist on work that conflicts with the successful completion of the current work process.

Why would they do this? It's probably not intended to make life miserable for the workers or to cost the company money. It's probably that they have a mental image of the way the work is being done such that their guidance seems beneficial to them.

They say "nature abhors a vacuum." Similarly, humans abhor a void in their understanding. They fill in the missing bits as best they can. Given a lack of direct knowledge, the brain fills in between the bits of knowledge it does have to form a coherent story that satisfies it. That's just the way brains work, and it's a good thing because we're always working from incomplete information. If we couldn't extend that information with past experience and information from other sources, we wouldn't be able to function effectively.

Years ago, a friend told me a story involving his young son. Apparently my friend's son didn't like going to bed in the dark, so my friend would leave a light on in his closet when he put him to bed. He'd go back later and turn off the light.

One night when he snuck in to do that, his son whispered to him from the bed, "Dad, don't turn it off. It turns itself off."

After many experiences of going to bed with the closet light on and waking up with it off, he had come to that conclusion. His father coming in and turning off the light didn't exist for him, as he'd never experienced it.

We fill our voids as best we can, and it helps us navigate our days in this world. In doing so, we invent myths, fables, legends, folk tales, theories, postulates, suppositions, conjectures, explanations, ideologies, and even religions of them. It's worth remembering that the stories we tell ourselves to fill our gaps are unreliable. They fill a gap, but it may be dangerous to expect them to support anything of value. They're not load bearing. Even scientific studies may fall victim to our tendency to paper over unknowns. It's hard work to find solid truths.

These void-filling stories are innumerable, and it would take super-human effort to constantly maintain awareness of which things we know, and which things we surmised based on a gap in our knowledge. That's why it helpful to habitually question our knowledge from time to time. "Is this something I know, or a heuristic that I've found useful?"

There's generally not a clear dividing line between the two. Even the stuff we know we know has limits in it's applicability. If we get curious about those limits, we may discover worlds beyond our explanatory stories.

While we may get good value from filling in "the rest of the story" from scant evidence, it's worth remembering that we'll never know it all. Don't stop exploring, even in territory that you think you've mastered.

P.S. Please help me out.

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