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Why Written Instructions Are the Most Undervalued Tool in Modern Team Management
How a Small Team Pulled Off a Record-Breaking Festival
Last weekend, our small team — about five times smaller than what a project like this typically requires — successfully delivered the Nasledniki Festival. And we set a record: more than 1,500 people attended.
One of the most common pieces of feedback we received was: “Thank you for giving us the chance to walk so many steps alongside our kids.” As my brother put it, steps are the new value proposition.
But that’s not actually what I want to talk about. I want to talk about the power of instructions.
Why People Resist Written Instructions in Management
People are disorganized by nature. We’re used to doing everything at the last minute, turning routine tasks into chaos.
And yet, we hate writing instructions. When I was a young, bold manager and startup founder, I had nothing but contempt for them — a pointless waste of time, a relic of corporate bureaucracy. Reading instructions felt just as bad. The only exception might be IKEA’s — but those aren’t really instructions, they’re cheerful little comic strips that make you feel like a craftsman: you start with a pile of wooden boards and end up with a chair and a table.
So here’s the pattern:
- We prefer to jump in headfirst and figure it out as we go. The Russian “avos” — the wing-it mentality — is undefeatable.
- Instructions are seen as bureaucratic formality, something for people who can’t handle ambiguity.
Why Instructions Are One of the Most Undervalued Tools in Modern Management
But here’s where I’ve landed today: instructions are one of the most undervalued tools in modern management.
Instructions exist to buy you time. Especially when the entire team reads and applies them at once.
If we had stuck to our instructions, this festival would have cost us far less — in time, resources, and nerves. We wrote them for ourselves, for the event administrators, for the curators, for the volunteers, for the partners… but not everyone read them.
What a 19-Hour Flight Taught Me About Following Instructions
I remember preparing for a trip to the United States to scale my international sports platform, BattleArena. A friend of mine who already ran a business there gave me a task for the 19-hour flight: take my polished project presentation and turn it into a detailed, step-by-step instruction document.
It wasn’t wasted effort. Americans see an instruction and follow it precisely. In one week, across six states, we launched the project.
The Bottom Line on Instructions in Team Management
Don’t underestimate instructions. They will come in handy.