One of the inspirations for what has become my Obey/Rebel project exploring rules in organizations was the 2010 book, Hacking Work, by Bill Jensen and Josh Klein. Subtitled Breaking Stupid Rules for Smart Results, the primary intended audience of the book is the typical employee, more specifically a typical knowledge worker, with examples of some stupid rules and how people have chosen to break those rules to get things done.
The closing section of the book, however, is written for the bosses, for the people who write, implement, and enforce (or not) these stupid rules, with encouragement to, "Do right by your employees."
The closing section of the book, however, is written for the bosses, for the people who write, implement, and enforce (or not) these stupid rules, with encouragement to, "Do right by your employees."
Somehow, most companies never got the memo on being user centered inside their firms. The overwhelming majority of work systems today (2010) are corporate centered, not user centered. This does not make these companies bad, just ill prepared to fully embrace the New World of Work. And ripe for the benevolent hacking of all their systems. All that hackers want is to have their day-to-day needs built into your infrastructure. Doing otherwise is misusing your most critical resource by wasting people's time, attention, and capability. (original emphasis) (p. 135)
Jensen and Klein go on to wonder at why this is still the case.
If most companies are not bad, and want to do right by their employees, why does this keep happening? Why is so little of their design user centered? It all comes down to one core assumption, an industrial age holdover: the right to mandate how time and attention will be used. (p. 136)
From here, they continue to develop their thoughts on how companies can adapt and implement a "new work contract" that supports employee centered design within the company.
Another perspective on this comes from a conversation between Professor Dave Snowden, of The Cynefin Company, and Daniel Susser on an episode of the Agile on the Mind Podcast from last summer titled, Complexity and Cognitive Science with Dave Snowden.
We discovered the main cause of mental breakdown in medical practitioners is the safety rules, not the job. And the reason is the safety rules are derived on the assumption that events happen in the center of a normal distribution. Reality is in the tails of a Pareto distribution. So you need to leave more autonomy for professional judgment because you can't work out in advance, virtue ethics, what the right thing is to do.
So as a rulemaker, I assume that it's a bell curve and that most of the stuff that's interesting is in the average, whereas actually the really dangerous stuff is the really unlikely but very high impact things. And that's what we'd call a Pareto distribution.
And we've done field ethnography with nurses in British hospitals. On average, they break the safety rules three times a day to provide empathetic care to patients. If they didn't break the rules, the system would break down, but they get blamed if something goes wrong.
And the same is true in companies. Companies rely on people breaking the rules when the circumstances change. (emphasis mine) So we need to restrict the rules and create processes for the areas beyond where the rules apply. And again, complicated Confucianism rules, complex Taoism heuristics and virtue.
I came across this conversation between Snowden and Susser while catching up on my podcast listening on a trip last week, so haven't had a chance yet to fully digest the implications. Even at a surface read, though, it provides some practical insight into how to approach the challenge of effective organizational process design and rule making that complements Jensen and Klein's thoughts on the question.
I'm looking forward to digging deeper and sharing what I find.
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