Long time ago, I used to assume that a mind greater than human has designed the world of policies for all eternity. These rules and policies perfectly match and do not contradict each other; they gently spin in a perfect harmony, vibrating with the music of heavenly spheres. When I encountered a mistake, a contradiction, a badly written policy, I thought all those people in power must be complete idiots…
The relationship of a person to an organization is somewhat similar to that of a child and her parents. To a small child, parents appear to be perfect and omnipotent. To an adolescent, they look like complete jerks and failures. A young adult eventually learns to accept his or her parents the way they are – imperfect, messy, confused, erring, but mostly OK human beings. That is what an organization and its policies are: written by human beings who are fallible, imperfect, tired, and sometimes irritated at something very specific. With time, the organizational memory fails to recall what was the occasion, but a policy tends to stick around. New policies are being written because no one remembers all the other policies, and we do not have the time to check for consistency. However, it does not mean the policies and rules are useless or stupid. It simply means we have to read them intelligently, try to understand the initial intent and the rationale, and apply them as well as we can while keeping the organization’s mission and ethos in mind.
Here is one example: we have a policy in the College that a university-wide committee for whatever reason was not able to approve for about a year and a half. We voted for a few changes, mainly to eliminate previous errors and inconsistencies. There was also one untenable requirement. Technically, we are supposed to use the older policy with more errors that can actually hurt some faculty. What should we do? The answer seems obvious to me – we use our better policy even though it has not been formally approved. Can someone complain or grieve us? – Not really, because to complain, you need to show some damages, and none is likely to occur. In fact, people are more likely to complain if we use the old, erroneous policy.
Policies, like laws, are not laws of nature. They cannot always be followed literally to the last point. This is why there is a whole world of law interpretation, when it is applied to new cases and changing circumstances. This is why the legal system has courts, not computers. Human affairs cannot be governed by algorithms precisely because we generate too much variation and too much uncertainty.
The relationship of a person to an organization is somewhat similar to that of a child and her parents. To a small child, parents appear to be perfect and omnipotent. To an adolescent, they look like complete jerks and failures. A young adult eventually learns to accept his or her parents the way they are – imperfect, messy, confused, erring, but mostly OK human beings. That is what an organization and its policies are: written by human beings who are fallible, imperfect, tired, and sometimes irritated at something very specific. With time, the organizational memory fails to recall what was the occasion, but a policy tends to stick around. New policies are being written because no one remembers all the other policies, and we do not have the time to check for consistency. However, it does not mean the policies and rules are useless or stupid. It simply means we have to read them intelligently, try to understand the initial intent and the rationale, and apply them as well as we can while keeping the organization’s mission and ethos in mind.
Here is one example: we have a policy in the College that a university-wide committee for whatever reason was not able to approve for about a year and a half. We voted for a few changes, mainly to eliminate previous errors and inconsistencies. There was also one untenable requirement. Technically, we are supposed to use the older policy with more errors that can actually hurt some faculty. What should we do? The answer seems obvious to me – we use our better policy even though it has not been formally approved. Can someone complain or grieve us? – Not really, because to complain, you need to show some damages, and none is likely to occur. In fact, people are more likely to complain if we use the old, erroneous policy.
Policies, like laws, are not laws of nature. They cannot always be followed literally to the last point. This is why there is a whole world of law interpretation, when it is applied to new cases and changing circumstances. This is why the legal system has courts, not computers. Human affairs cannot be governed by algorithms precisely because we generate too much variation and too much uncertainty.
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