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HowManyRulesAreTooManyI've been talking to people about rules at work. There are rules to apply to certain contractual products and rules about when to apply the rules. Some industries are filled with rules - to protect people, to avoid penalties, to mitigate risk, and so on. Work stoppages as a result of people following their work rules to the letter came up in WhyWeUseWiki. So, how many rules is just right? - BeckyWinant 2003.07.23 Interesting question. There's often a non-linear interaction between rules. Sometimes you add one and things get a little worse; other times you add one and the system grinds to a halt. The greater the number of rules, the greater the chance of some of them conflicting. And after grinding to a halt, there's a niave tendency among the rule generators to add yet another rule to make sure the system doesn't grind to a halt again. You know you've got too many when honoring them all means you can't make "reasonable" progress, for some negotiated value of "reasonable". But that negotiation never seems to happen. And it depends on the rules.
--DaveSmith 2003.07.23 Under what conditions would you want more than zero rules? --DaleEmery 2003.07.23 Intriguing question, Dale. Cultures seem to need rules whenever there is a perception of scarcity. SteveSmith 2003.07.24 ...or fear or a desire for control. - BeckyWinant 2003.07.24 We ought to start by looking at meta-rules, which define how many rules you have, effectively. For example, there's an old joke about the rules in various countries. I can't remember all of them now (maybe someone can fill me in), but some of it went like this:
- JerryWeinberg 2003.07.23 Then there's the jokes about business rules:
I found the joke on the Internet: In France, everything is permitted, except what is explicitly forbidden. In Germany, everything is forbidden, except what is explicitly permitted. In the Soviet Union, everything is forbidden, including what is explicitly permitted. And in Italy, everything is permitted, especially what is explicitly forbidden. KenEstes 03/08/13 It seems like a lot of people here seriously dislike rules. I have a slightly different attitude. I dislike rules that do not work. I tend to appreciate the rules that work the way I believe they should work, and that produce a result that I approve of. For instance, when we start experiencing a lot of confusion and chaos at work around a particular situation, I'll often sit down with the people most involved and ask "What rule can we make for ourselves to help this go better?" Some of the rules are completely arbitrary (addresses in the database will be formatted this way). We need a standard approach, and many different ways would work, but this is the one we (or I) have chosen. Another example - I have a very simple rule up at the barn. The horses are only allowed in the barn when they have a halter on. Now that they've learned my rule, I can leave the door open while I do chores and they won't come in and steal hay. (Ronnie does push it though, he's learned that I won't yell and chase him as long as his _rear_ feet are outside the door. And boy, can he stretch his neck and back! <g>) Rules are just tools. They can be used well and they can be abused. --SuePetersen 2003.07.23 Sue, I think you've nailed a point that is often overlooked - that rules are tools that we can use or not use. A perception problem with rules or ruling is that people assume (or believe) that the rules are the higher order to be obeyed and lose sight of the rules as peoples creation. I suppose that means that the problem with rules is not the rule, but the people that create or enforce the rule. I'll go along with Sue. Distilling knowledge into guidelines, standards, and "rules" is extremely useful for repetitive activities. The degree of rigidity appropriate varies. It's usually, but not always, useful to have an exception mechanism for when the rule is awkward. For research and one-time creative efforts, many rules intended for repetitive activity need to be reexamined or ignored. People whose work centers around production activity as opposed to project activity will desire rules so less time is wasted in rethinking. Project people often need to peel back that thinking, and often find "we've got a rule" so habituated that they have difficulty with it. Perhaps it's useful to examine our own context for goodness or badness of rules. In a technical context, assembler languages are almost free of rules (as much as you can be on a given hardware), while modern O-O languages have enforced rules. While anything can be done in the rule-free assembler language world, that's a liability in validation, debugging and maintenance. Rules simplify. Simplicity can be appropriate or not. I shudder at attempting refactoring an unconstrained assembler module. What one can attempt successfully often depends on ability to constrain accidents. --BobLee 2003.07.24 Bob, Your observation on the importance of context introduces one of the complexities that rules try to address and can often miss. Maybe defining contexts clearly is difficult? Maybe Jerry's introduction of the concept of meta-rules resolves that. I'm not sure. Without intent of offending anyone, I wonder about the introduction of religious missionaries into cultures where the rules and spiritual systems have been working just fine. - BeckyWinant 2003.07.24 Becky, that begs the question of who gets to decide whether the rules and systems have been working "just fine"? I think I have a rule, or meta-meta-rule, that tells me, "Always find out where the rule came from." Only a very few came down from heaven on stone tablets, though lots of people act as if they all came from there. - JerryWeinberg 2003.07.24Good question, Jerry. I suspect there is another rule behind this. Do all significant rules come on stone tablets? (Mind you the first ten are pretty hard to beat). Some have come from parables, metaphors, and teachers who have hoped to model "the right behavior". Maybe who gets to decide should be another topic? - BeckyWinant 2003.07.25You got rules from heaven on stone tablets? Way cool. See, all I've ever run into before is people who say that some people said they got rules from heaven on stone tablets, usually long ago, far away, and the tablets were lost as airline baggage at some point. I have this meta-meta-rule, or maybe it's only a meta-rule that says: "Says who?" and "How do we know that for sure?" I often find it amusing to observe urgency in action: any electronic gadget seems to rule its owner. People who live by the phone seem to die if not allowed to answer it "right now". Stepping back, I ask myself, "If I weren't here to answer, and it were that important, what would happen?" My conclusion is usually that:
I like "Sunset laws" for rules - if they've been around for a while, do they still justify themselves? Should they be discarded, reanalyzed or kept as-is? What about conservation laws for rules - for each new one an old one must be removed? BobLee 2003.07.25 Bob, you've delineated some new categories
Don Gray has written about implicit rules (models that govern our reality) and that is a topic that he and I will be addressing at AYE. Bob, is it a rule that every rule should be examined periodically? - JerryWeinberg 2003.07.25 Jerry, it depends. Our revolutionary forefathers thought so. We have a series of courts culminating in the Supreme Court to examine rules by challenge. Along the way, intense examination of consistency goes on. We also have a way to change any of the rules by 2/3 majority of the voters. Buffering the rules from mere popular fads seems to balance things. Unfortunately, the rate of examination of rules is much slower than the rate of rule creation. I suspect that the explosive growth of executive branch rule making exceeded the estimated need for governance from the founders in the 18th century. I once worked for a wise old man some 20 years ago. In the government, he told me that whenever you find a stupid rule, you can trace back to a time when that rule didn't exist. At that time, someone got greedy and stupid, took advantage of the situation, made many other people mad, so they passed a rule against the behavior. That was easier to do than firing the greedy person. DwaynePhillips 27 July 2003. Dwayne, How sad! In reality it is much, much harder to come up with a fair and useful rule for the multitude than it is to fire the greedy person. The greedy person will just find another path and in the meantime others will suffer. - BeckyWinant 2003.08.04 Another source of seemingly stupid rules is old problems. A problem occurs... then, someone makes a rule to try to resolve/minimize the source/impact of the problem. After a while, this becomes 'the way we do things', and no one thinks to ask if it is relevant anymore.... long after the things that caused the original problem have disappeared. In early process improvement efforts, I loved talking with people and asking them why they did things a certain way. I often found out they had no idea why it was 'required', and thought it was the biggest waste of time. After a search to uncover the history (not always successful) and discussions of what might result if they were to STOP doing this -- we had a Quick Win. Just stop doing it! That was successful quite a few times... in one other, we uncovered a relevant reason, and made modifications to the 'rule'. That's process improvement as a useful tool! DianeGibson 8-5-03 Good principle, Diane. I have many stories of this kind, some quite amazing. I'm beginning to think that the right topic for the Panel Discussion (SessionThree019) is "What does it really take to improve things around here?" - JerryWeinberg 2003.08.05 There should only be one rule:- All rules are generalisations. All generalisations are wrong. Including this one. PhilStubbington 8-7-03 Phil, that only results in a pair o' docs. Surely we need more rules than that? BobLee 2003.08.07 Or, "The only hard and fast rule is: There are no other hard and fast rules." DonGray 2003.08.11 But there's no shortage of hard rules or of fast rules. They're a lot easier to make and a lot harder to break. - JerryWeinberg 2003.08.11 Looking back to the original question and the first few replies--notably Dale's--I'm reminded of how "Why do we need X at all?" can be either an effective way to focus a conversation, or a way to derail the conversation entirely. (That's not exactly the way Dale phrased it, but that's how the question can get heard.) Posed early enough, while concepts are still fresh in people's heads, it's a good way to trigger fresh thinking. But far into an endevour, when the initial thinking is buried beneath additional layers of thinking, yanking people back to first principles can be very disruptive. I've seen meetings either snap into focus or collapse into chaos when a "Why do we need X at all?" questions gets asked. I'm still trying to understand why this is. Is it that the layers of thinking an assumptions are inherently unstable? Or is is that people can only keep so much in their heads at once (5 +/- 2), and that forcing people back to first principles causes too great an internal context switch? DaveSmith 2003.08.11 It helps, personally at least, if you set up "return to first principles" as a regularly scheduled event. I think New Year's resolutions were supposed to work that way, but once a year is probably not enough (though some religions have this schedule for reexamination). In a project, just have a periodic "first principles" review, and get it ingrained in the culture. Then it will be okay to ask the question. - JerryWeinberg 2003.08.12 Responding to BobLee.... Yes, it's a pair of ducks alright (http://www.blong.com/Undocumented/PdoxWin5.htm). Okay, if I have to have more than zero rules, then my one rule would be under promise, over deliver.
PhilStubbington 2003.08.13
Updated: Wednesday, August 13, 2003 |
