Hi, Chip - another excellent post with some fascinating stories.

I once was responsible for helping employees install a standardized organizational system for both paper and electronic workflow in an organization.  As part of that, I would spend much time working with individual employees as they literally took their workspace apart, organized all items into standardized categories and reorganized how they stored data and materials.

A big part of this was analyzing work processes.   One time, I had an employee who was struggling with what to call a work step in which she received forms from another employee and in turn, gave them to a third employee ... without doing anything to the forms, such as verifying or sorting.  After much discussion about this, we were unable to determine why she was held responsible for doing this, other than that familiar "I"ve always done it this way" statement.

Similarly to your story about Alexander, I finally learned from a long-time employee that years earlier, two women who did not like each other each had responsibility for a step in a work process.  Since they could not get along, their manager chose the coward's way out by inserting a third employee (the "ancestor" of the women with whom I was working) to receive and pass on the documents.

Over the years, just like the soldiers guarding the empty spot, generations of employees were taught to follow the "system" without awareness of why that step existed or why it was pointless.

Two lessons here for me:  1)  Managers sometimes create more problems when they are reluctant to face an issue honestly and directly; and 2) Employees are more prone to simply doing what they are told without much, if any, questioning of the reasons or rationale for doing something than we might like to think.

Thanks for both the trip down memory lane and the reminder of how we need to continually analyze what we are doing, why we are doing it, and whether we should stop or change doing it:)

John