Traction Outsourcing
Walk into almost any office building in Abuja or Lagos and you will find at least one door that defeats people daily. It has a flat metal plate at chest height, the kind that only makes sense on a door you push, yet the door needs to be pulled. Visitors slow down, hesitate, push anyway, bounce off it, then pull sheepishly while glancing around to see who noticed. Nobody designed that door to embarrass people. It simply gave them no clue about what to do, and they filled the gap with a guess that happened to be wrong.
The design theorist Don Norman noticed this exact failure everywhere he looked, so often that doors like this now carry his name in design circles. He built an entire body of work, most famously the book "The Design of Everyday Things," around a single idea that sounds almost too simple to matter: when people fail to use something correctly, the fault rarely belongs to them. It belongs to whoever built the thing and assumed the user would figure it out. That idea, once you notice it, is impossible to unsee in how many Nigerian businesses are run.
What Don Norman Actually Argued
Don Norman's design thinking rests on a handful of principles that translate directly into business life. A signifier is a cue that tells a person what action to take, a flat plate for push, a handle for pull. Feedback confirms that an action worked, a light that turns on, a message that says received. Mapping is the natural link between a control and what it does, a switch positioned near the device it operates. A conceptual model is the mental picture a person builds of how something works before they even try it.
When any of these go missing, people do not fail because they are careless. They fail because they were never given anything to work with, and they had to invent their own logic on the spot. Don Norman's argument was that good design removes the guessing entirely. A business, at its core, is also a designed system, and it fails or succeeds by the same rules.
The Staff Version of the Norman Door
Picture a new front desk hire at a consulting firm in Abuja, three days into the job, facing an angry walk-in client for the first time. Nobody handed her a written procedure for this. She was told to use her initiative, so she does, escalating the complaint to the wrong department. Her manager later queries her for poor judgement, without pausing to ask whether the judgement was ever hers to have in the first place.
This is a Norman door wearing a staff badge. The business gave her no signifier, no signpost for what to do when a client walked in upset, and expected the correct action to occur to her naturally. When it did not, she carried the blame that belonged to the missing structure. Multiply this across every new hire and the pattern becomes visible: an owner growing frustrated that staff "cannot think," staff growing quietly resentful of being punished for something nobody taught them, and a business that keeps hiring for common sense instead of building the system that would make common sense unnecessary.
The fix costs far less than the damage it prevents. A one page escalation chart pinned near the front desk, a short onboarding pack that walks through the first ten situations a new hire will actually meet, a checklist for the tasks that repeat every week. None of this is complicated, and it is exactly the kind of documentation structured staff training is built to produce. It simply replaces a blank wall with a signifier, the flat plate that tells a person which way to push.
The Client Version of the Norman Door
The same failure happens on the other side of the counter. A client visits an office to discuss a service and finds no one has told them where to sit, who to ask for, or what happens first, the conversation or the paperwork. A job applicant submits a CV and is left to guess whether silence means rejection or simply a slow process. A client who has just signed an agreement is not told whether to expect an invoice first or a call to schedule a deposit, so they phone the office repeatedly just to find out what comes next.
None of these clients are being unreasonable. They are standing in front of a Norman door, one built from silence instead of steel, and they are doing what anyone does at a door with no signifier: guessing, hesitating, or walking away. A business that wants to keep a client through the full length of a transaction has to remove that guesswork at every step, a confirmation message after every stage, a printed or emailed next-steps sheet, and front-of-house staff who have been properly briefed to say exactly where a new visitor should go before they even have to ask.
Running the Norman Door Test
Before assuming a mistake was carelessness, on either side of the business, it is worth running a quick test. Can a new staff member complete this task correctly without first asking a colleague what to do? Can a client move to the next step without calling the office to confirm it? If ten different people faced this same point in the process, would most of them get it right on the first try, or would most of them hesitate the way visitors hesitate at a door with no signifier?
If the honest answer points to hesitation, the problem is not the person standing at that door. It is the door.
How Traction Outsourcing Helps You Fix the Doors
This is the work behind the work. Startup structuring builds the signifiers a growing business does not yet have, the org charts, escalation paths, and process documents that tell every new hire exactly which way to push. Business advisory helps founders further along find the doors that have been silently confusing staff and clients for years, the ones everyone has simply learned to push against out of habit.
Once the structure exists on paper, corporate training makes sure it actually reaches the people who need it, and staff outsourcing puts trained people in the roles where a missing signifier costs the most, the front desk, the first client call, the first week of a new hire's job.
The Practical Takeaway
Don Norman's real gift to business owners is permission to stop blaming people for problems that structure created. Assuming that staff or clients will simply know what to do is the fastest route to job dissatisfaction, owner frustration, and quiet inefficiency, because it hands the outcome of every interaction over to guesswork and hopes for the best. The businesses that grow with less friction are usually the ones that have gone through their own processes, from the first day of onboarding to the last line of an invoice, and replaced every unmarked door with a clear signifier. Staff stop guessing. Clients stop calling to ask what happens next. Everyone, on both sides of the business, already knows which way to push.
Further Reading: What Is Structure in Business?, Why Every Nigerian SME Needs an Employee Handbook, Why Nigerian Businesses Are Investing in Staff Training.
Find the Doors Your Business Has Been Quietly Confusing People With.
Book a free 30-minute advisory call. We will walk through where your staff and clients are being left to guess, and what a clear signifier looks like for each one.