I recently finished reading the tongue-in-cheek autobiography of Richard Feynman. I really recommend reading it. There were two things from the book I wanted to highlight here.
The first comes from the time Feynman was lecturing in Brazil and this exchanged happened:
One other thing I could never get them to do was to ask questions. Finally, a student explained it to me: “If I ask you a question during the lecture, afterwards everybody will be telling me, ‘What are you wasting our time for in the class? We’re trying to learn something. And you’re stopping him by asking a question.’”
I’ll leave it without comment.
The other is more involved and shows an interesting lesson.
During the Manhattan project, Feynman was put in charge of the Special Engineering Detachment – that is a group of “clever boys from high school who had engineering ability.” They would punch cards and run them through IBM computers, but they were never told why.
Once Richard explained what they were doing and why, the team was able to come up with improvements to the process and were generally more motivated. And the gains were quite impressive:
“although it took them nine months to do three problems before, we did nine problems in three months”
So the next time you want to hold back information, make sure you don’t want efficiency.
All quotes from Feynman, Richard P.. “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”: Adventures of a Curious Character. W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
Agile Musings 