Go and see the actual place and the actual thing; reports abstract away the information you need.
Toyota's practice, and the reason its executives walk factory floors. The information lost in reporting is not detail but context — what the place smells like, where people actually stand.
In practice
- A product manager reading complaint tickets learns less in a month than an afternoon standing behind three users.
- A hospital executive who spends a shift in the discharge lounge discovers what no report contained.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Organizations & Bureaucracy
- Essay
- Rules for running organisations, and for pressing them