Why, why, why isn’t common sense common?  We deal with people in our work lives who do dumb things.  They make stupid decisions which fly full in the face of common sense.  It is such a puzzle.  Why don’t they get it, why can’t they see the obvious logical answer? 
 
Reflecting on this phenomenon, we have to draw a clear line between losing our sanity trying to anticipate these crazies and getting on with our work.  That is actually the really scary bit – we can never imagine what they would choose as (for them) a rational course of action, which is actually irrational.  How can we spend our entire day worrying about what someone else might do?  Well we can’t, so rather than go crazy ourselves trying to head off feckless behavior, let’s concentrate on what we can control.
 
The first decision is, are we the idiot who is the cause of the problem? Whoa!  What if we are one creating havoc and they are just pawns in our game.  That can’t be right can it?  We are smarter than them, we see better and further than they do.  We have perspective, so let’s put a red line through that possibility right now. 
 
Wait - not so fast!  What if we have not properly trained these people.  What if they are actually “the uninformed” masquerading as “idiots” because we are at fault by not having invested in them sufficiently?  What if we have been too busy with our own work to explain the finer points of various tasks?  What if we have already mastered it, so logically the task is “easy”, therefore not a lot of explanation needed, right?
 
Question - were we perfection personified when we first encountered this totally unfamiliar and unknown task?  Have we conveniently forgotten the learning curve applies to others as well as ourselves?  We may have assumed the task was easy, so we went light on the explanation and forgot to check for understanding.  We may have merrily moved on and not put in place some regular checking mechanism to ensure they have got it.  “I show you, we do it together, now you do it and I check it”, sound boring and so basic, but did you do that?
 
Are you a perfectionist?  Are you the type of person for whom there is only the “right way” of doing things?  Does your logic rule and allow no other possibilities for task completion?  If the “idiot” does it differently to you, is that incorrect or just different? Are you entertaining the possibility there might be multiple paths to the mountain top?  Maybe we need to consider there might be equally valid solutions to the same problem, including those we haven’t even contemplated or thought about.  What if we went really crazy and asked them for their ideas on how we might complete the task?  What if we just shut up and listen quietly?
 
 Well now, let’s give you the benefit of the doubt and say you did explain it, you did seek their ownership of the process by asking for their ideas and did incorporate their offerings into the final solution and they still managed to screw it up.  What do we do now? 
If we are going to empower people, we have to empower them to screw things up as well.  We ask them to take a risk with the unknown (There Be Dragons!), the unfamiliar, to step up to greater accountability.  When we whack them because they made an idiotic mistake, we are in danger.  We are double-crossing the person, because we asked them to go into this area of weakness in the first place and then we belt them for it when they get it wrong.  The trust is broken right there and they will join the Great And Venerable Guild Of Do Nothings, because that is the safest path forward.  The Guild has a mega membership in Japan by the way, as almost every Japanese person has learnt how not to be the derukugi (出る釘)– the nail that gets hammered down.  Their colleagues are also watching hawk-like for your reaction, so they can gauge the danger associated with anything new and shiny coming from your direction in the future.
 
We need to provide a Reasonable Allowable Margin of Error (RAME) for th