You know, whenever I’ve been given a rather dense report or document of some sort to digest, I confess that (most of the time) I’ve scrutinized all parts of it very carefully, making margin notes and highlights and so forth. I’ve even read through the appendices, as painful as some may find that. But I adopted the habit of pre-skimming as I advanced in my career, to get the “broad strokes” before I more closely analyzed the contents.

Of course, this type of scrutiny is far less appealing when we’re presented with anything resembling legalese. We just skim it over and hope for the best (think of the average privacy policy for a given online subscription), or if we’ve got deeper pockets and depending on the magnitude of the transaction/action, we pay big bucks to a lawyer to interpret it.

You just never know what weird and unexpected stuff you might miss.

There’s a semi-famous story of the ‘80s powerhouse rock band Van Halen who had it written into their venue performance contract that the promoter was responsible for ensuring that there were no brown M&Ms in the candy table backstage. This might seem completely absurd at first glance, but it makes sense when you consider that this was a test, or a more latent “canary in the coalmine”, to ensure that the promoter had read, absorbed, and thus fulfilled the terms of the performance contract. https://www.entrepreneur.com/growing-a-business/no-brown-mms-what-van-halens-insane-contract-clause/232420

At the time, Van Halen’s equipment setup was much more sophisticated than the typical rock band’s arrangement, giving rise to the need for some serious spatial navigation, and so the band couldn’t afford to cut corners. Running with the devil in the details. If the band discovered brown M&M’s candies, they immediately jumped on the signal and carried out a complete line check, inspecting every aspect of the sound, lighting and stage setup to make sure it was perfect. They apparently had an option to cancel the entire contract at the expense of the promoter if this occurred, but this was arguably a bluff.

On the surface, this odd gesture might have given the impression of the band as being self-indulgent, arrogant, and even flippant. But the irony was that Van Halen was safeguarding against the promoter’s potential flippant gestures of skimming over the contract without serious thought.

Fast-forward about 30 years to the 2010s decade, when I read a story about a university professor who buried a passage in his course syllabus about $100 inserted into a locker on campus – and he provided the combination therein.

Guess what? When the term was done and exams completed, the professor opened up the locker in question, to find…$100 still intact (!!)

Wow. Yeah. Not sure how to take THAT one. Probably not personally – I mean, I doubt it had anything to do with the quality of his lecture or teaching style, since it was, after all, the syllabus. Maybe there’s just something off-putting about syllabi in general. (Spell-checker accepted that plural, which I admit was unexpected.)

I can tell you that there were at least two times in my career when I recalled making a glaring error in a report that I had just circulated to a bunch of people, but nobody ever pointed it out to me. I can’t say conclusively that “nobody noticed”, because they may have just been extra-polite about it. Yes, I’m being somewhat facetious. I don’t know which is worse – the revelation that a fairly important document I’d worked on wasn’t read by anyone based on that [absence of] signal, or that I made an embarrassing mistake that others chose not to raise. Maybe a bit of both! I joked in my mind about what would’ve (not?) happened if I hypothetically put something outrageous or even profane in there.

But unlike Van Halen or that college prof, I didn’t deliberately insert the non-conforming bit.

In any case: you just never know what you might miss if you skim (or skip) over the provisions of an agreement or contract or policy. There’s actually a concept called hyperbolic discounting – something I mention in my book Diamond Min(e)d – which states that people tend to pursue more immediately available “rewards”, when it may very well have consequences a long time from now; but because that long time seems so far away, it’s, well, hyperbolic. This comes into play when reading privacy agreements, whereby people are just anxious to engage socially with whatever online app they’re using, so they rapidly read (if at all) through the policy. (This is called “the privacy paradox”, since many people will tell you that they highly value their privacy in general, but those same people will throw that out the window when faced with instant grat.)

As a last thought on the subject of “to fully absorb the text or not” (and I’m assuming you didn’t skip the past paragraphs before reading this), I am a big proponent of Scrum/Agile methodology, as it’s meant to curtail the amount of written reports / plans produced. Maybe this is a good thing, when you think of all the pages that many team members probably just skipped/skimmed over in traditional waterfall methods. I can even recall my first formal classroom training on Agile, when I was shown the Agile Manifesto, a document I found very concise. But alas, there were no concealed references to $100 in a locker – and I’m sure I would’ve spotted it right away.

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