Rules without Reasons
Peter de Jager is a provocative Speaker, Writer and Consultant. His primary focus in on how we manage change, technology and the future.
In addition to speaking at conferences worldwide, he's also writen monthly columns for CIO Magazine and Computerworld Canada.
His goal is always to question what we think is so, and in so doing perhaps open up new opportunities.
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In a recent client discussion, a manager was bemoaning the inability of staff to think for themselves. He’s the owner of a landscaping company and his employees enter the backyards of a number of clients each day. Many of these clients own dogs and there’s an important rule all his employees
must follow. “If you open a gate, close it.” So
important, he has it, and a handful of other rules printed on a little card.
Now that rule is simple enough, it's not complicated. All employees will nod their heads when asked if they understand it. The situation which caused this manager to tear his hair out was a recent visit to
some of his clients during the day, where he found several of the gates wide open and dogs roaming the streets.
When he queried his employees, they responded that the gates were open when they arrived and since they didn’t open them, they didn’t have to close them.
It is tempting to cast aspersions on the IQ of his staff, but when asked if he ever explained why the gates must be closed, the manager responded “No… the reason is obvious!” Perhaps he’s right, but it
was obviously not obvious to his staff. Nobody deliberately puts household pets at risk.
If this example is too simplistic, then consider a more elevated scenario. On
a flight to Toronto, I witnessed another error in
judgment caused by the imposition of rules without reasons.
A passenger was sitting in a seat which would not lock into the upright position. Now, since the
stated rule for landing is that all seats must be upright (and tray tables stowed) the flight attendant had no choice but to move the passenger to another seat. Since the seat directly behind the passenger was empty, the passenger was moved one seat backwards.
Now if you’re asking yourself what the problem was, then you’ve just fallen victim to the consequences of rules without reasons. Seats
must be upright when landing so that if there’s a bump (socially acceptable euphemism for “crash”) then passengers
won't be thrust forward to collide with a reclined seat pointing directly at their fragile heads.
In reality, the rule is not “passengers must be sitting in upright seats”, but instead it is “passengers must not be sitting behind a reclined seat”. By moving the passenger one seat back, the flight attendant
moved the passenger from a “safe” seat and placed them into a “dangerous” one.
Reasons are what we use, to make sense of the world. There’s nothing new here. Listen to a child as they grow up and you’ll be besieged with “Why is…?”, “Why does…?”, “Why are…?” and a thousand other variations of
the instinctual plea to understand. Our staff, and for that matter ourselves and our managers, have not lost that need to understand why things are the way they are. Once we know the why of something, especially
a rule, then we can extend that rule to cover situations not yet written down on a little card. We’re also more accommodating when rules create a restriction or imposition on our actions.
There’s another reason to know the reasons behind all rules. Knowing why a rule was put in place allows us to monitor the continuing appropriateness of the rule. Think of it as a way to reduce the growth of bureaucratic rules, rules which exist only because that’s what we did before, and therefore that’s what we’ll do again.
There’s one more old example of rules without reasons, which I’ve always found amusing and informative. There was a family where when the wife cooked a roast she always cut off two inches from each end. When asked why, she responded “That’s what my mom taught me to do.” When they asked the question of her mom, the response was the same, “That’s what my mom taught me to do.” And when they asked the Grandmother, now 96 years old, why she used to cut the ends off the roast she replied, “I only had a small pan and that was the only way to get the roast into it!”
When we impose rules without reasons, we create situations where people have no choice but to follow them to the letter. It’s not a matter of them ignoring the ‘spirit of the rule’, it’s that they aren’t aware of what the spirit was meant to be.
© 2005 Peter de Jager – Peter is interested in all things related to Management, but especially Change Management.
Contact him at
Pdejager@technobility.com
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