A post by our guest editor, John Worthington.

Having done this years ago, I should have known I’d never be home by lunchtime; assembling a backyard playset is not routine.

By lunchtime we were on page 18 of a more than 70 pages of “instructions”--- more manifesto than manual. Even the convenient videos did not seem to help much. The beast in front of us wasn’t just a swing set. It was a monolithic, polyethylene-fortified tribute to globalization manufactured in a faraway province.

So, we read (and re-read) more than 70 pages of IKEA-meets-Mandarin gibberish, clearly written by someone who had never felt the damp frustration of a power drill stripping away hex head bolts until they wept chrome tears and spun like drunk ballerinas on a warped pine stage, mocking you with every impotent swirl.

We were in the belly of the operational beast.

But to me it wasn’t just about a backyard nightmare. It was about how work gets done. How procedures and work instructions --- the sacred cows of operations manuals --- are too often written by some detached “design” authority who’s never actually driven a lag bolt into a pre-drilled ---but tragically misaligned--- hole with a half charged power drill.

In the world of Unified Service Management (USM), there’s a truth that hits harder than a rogue 2x4 to the shin; procedures and work instructions should be written by the people who to the damn work.

Why? Because they know what it really takes.

USM gives us a way to manage that delicate dance between standardization and localization. You can have universal patterns—the sacred workflows, the logical scaffolding of “how things ought to go.” But the details? The play-by-play of how it really gets done? That’s got to be shaped by the folks with dirt under their nails and calluses on their palms.

Pattern vs. Practice

Let’s get real. No matter how brilliant your design is, if the people doing the job don’t understand it—or worse, have to reinterpret it on the fly—it breaks. Not with a bang, but with the slow, maddening drip of lost time, rework, and profanity.

USM respects this. It says: define your process once, map your workflow consistently, and then let the frontline teams craft their procedures within that pattern. It’s the beautiful tension of freedom within form. Like jazz, but for IT and service operations. Or in this case, jungle gym assembly.

The swing set fiasco? That’s what happens when localization is not part of the plan. When instructions are universal, but context is ignored. When the work is imagined, not experienced.

The American Dream, in Metric and Misalignment

Evan after 8 hours we didn’t get the damn thing built. We were broken men. But something else happened too. Somewhere between the "support beam C17" and the existential dread of misplacing a 5/16" washer, I found an odd moment of clarity.

This is exactly what USM was made for. Not swing sets, necessarily—but the reality that work doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s messy, local, lived. And unless your systems, your methods, your “beautifully laminated binders,” respect the doers of the work, they’re doomed to gather dust—or worse, spawn chaos.

Final Thought from the Backyard Trenches

There’s a lesson buried in every stripped screw and misread diagram. If you want things done right, don’t just tell people what to do—give them the structure and method and then let them tell you how it gets done.

Service management, like swing set assembly, isn’t just about what’s written. It’s about who writes it—and whether they’ll be the ones lying under it when it collapses.

If you’re a US-based professional still clinging to the delusion that standardization and localization are mortal enemies, do yourself a favor: reach out. I’m always happy to talk about how USM flips that script.

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If you enjoyed John's post and it made you think about improving your own organization, please check out his USM Professional profile and his personal website, or better: contact John for a free consultation.
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