When a message reaches you that isn't yours, the instinct is to pass it to the person who deals with it. According to the source, that only widens the problem. The one correct action is to send the message back to whoever sent it, so that next time he goes to the right place.
Two names for every needless contact
The source claims that a sharp executive can spot needless traffic from miles away. Two categories make that possible, and nearly every needless contact falls into one of them. The source calls them the two basics of developed traffic, which means any work that did not need to happen in the first place.
The first is off-line: a message sent to the wrong person. It reached you, and it is not yours. The second is off-origin: something issued by a person who was not supposed to issue it, such as a decision or an announcement that was never theirs to make.
Suppose a customer writes straight to the owner about a delivery date, when someone in the business handles exactly that. That is off-line. Or an employee who tells a customer about a discount on his own initiative. That is off-origin, because the decision was never his.
Sometimes the gap looks small and costs a lot. A supplier who sends an invoice to the owner's home address instead of the bookkeeper turns one action into three.
These two names replace a general feeling of overload with a question you can ask about any message: did it reach the right place, and was the sender the right person to send it? In the very passage that lists the two categories, the source also says what to do with them. A piece of paper that does not belong to you goes back to where it came from.
The third category, the one that surprises
The source adds a third category: off-policy. It covers a message that comes from someone who could have known the matter is already covered by policy, meaning a standing, written way of handling it.
In plain words, someone asks you a question whose answer is already written down somewhere. He asked because he has no idea the answer exists. A question like that points to a policy that exists and that nobody knows about, and it gives you no reason to scold the person who asked.
Suppose an owner is asked three times a month about her cancellation policy, which is posted on her website. What is missing is people knowing where it lives, so the question keeps arriving. Or a team that answered a question it kept getting by sending the answer to everyone one time. The question returned anyway, because the answer was never stored where people could find it.
That is what makes the category useful. A question that keeps returning marks a place where the answer exists and does not reach people, and that is where to fix it.
Why passing it on makes things worse
Here the source gives an instruction that runs against what most of us do. In its view, misrouting in the full sense of the word is receiving an improper message, forwarding it to someone else, and failing to send it back to its originator.
The reasoning is simple. The moment you forward such a message to anyone other than the sender, you have involved other people and blocked their lines too. A line is a channel through which things reach a person and leave him. Then comes the sentence that settles it: “The ONLY correct action is to send it to the originator as improper.”
That runs against instinct. Forwarding what isn't yours to whoever it belongs to feels helpful. In practice three people are now involved instead of one, and the sender has learned nothing. Next time he comes to you again.
Suppose an owner forwards a misdirected enquiry to an employee to help out the customer. The customer keeps contacting the owner directly for another year. Now the opposite: the same owner sends one enquiry straight back with a single line saying who handles it and how to reach her. That customer never came back to him.
Or a manager who passes every supplier question on to her team. Six months later the team is fielding every supplier question there is, and she is still stuck in the middle.
When you forward it, you become a party
The source closes the subject with a sentence that points at you. Pass along a message nobody should have written, and you share in the original needless traffic, which began with somebody else. Later in the booklet the source goes one step further and calls handling such a thing without recognizing it the biggest goof a person can make.
This changes how you can look at every message that passes through your hands. Forwarding feels like a solution, because the item left your desk. In practice it will keep reaching you, and you will be part of the reason.
What the booklet has on this
The chapter this article draws on includes two exercises: the sorting, and the return. After them comes a self-check, and from there the booklet moves on to a list of the types that eat the day, each one by name.
If you find yourself in the middle all the time, between customers, suppliers and staff, check how many of the messages passing through you should never have reached you.