Reading up on this Deming person who's apparently big in business religion, I mean, philosophy. I came across this:

Deming used an illustration of washing a table to teach a lesson about the relationship between purpose and method. If you tell someone to wash a table, but not the reason for washing it, they cannot do the job properly. That does not mean just giving the explanation without an operational definition. The information about why the table needs to be washed, and what is to be done with it, makes it possible to do the job intelligently.

Hah. This is the polar opposite of my experience in the military, where absolutely everything operated on a need-to-know basis: everything, everywhere, right down to why you pitch a tent in a particular way. Presumably this was to condition us into obeying orders without question.

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