Mr. Chen uses a crisis as an example of why some processes just don’t work – essentially, “The people who benefit from this site are not the same people who would make the site useful”. As Raymond notes, in a crisis situation the people who are dealing with the crisis are usually too busy and knee deep in the crisis to worry about needing to be informed – they are about as informed as they’re going to get.

This cuts to the heart of many organizational failures. Oftentimes, the people who need to know about a change do not find out about it because the people who make the change have no incentive to inform others about that change.

This leads to paperwork, and forms, and a lot of the organizational crap that are often impediments to getting actual work done. These things are created to ensure that the parties who could benefit from knowing are informed in a somewhat timely manner.

This is also a way to separate the professionals from everyone else. Professionals know that they have to keep everyone in the loop, and when to keep them in the loop.

The other side of the coin is knowing when to expect feedback – asking to be informed just to satisfy one’s own insecurities is an impediment. Who wants to deal with a child asking “are we there yet?” every ten minutes?

Working on a team that doesn’t do this well is a good way to poison otherwise good people. If you’re the one person on the team who is always letting others know what is going on, but is never told about the things you need to know, it gets real easy to fall out of the habit. A case of a barrel of bad apples spoiling the one good one.

So, the next time you find yourself filling out a form to get something simple done, and there’s a long delay between making your request and getting it filled, remember that it is all because someone, somewhere didn’t know the best time to open their mouth.