All policy constrains good action, as well as bad
On bad days, perhaps it constrains good action rather more often
Organisational policy is an important tool. It can help organisations be compliant, teams to behave consistently, and employees to understand what's expected of them. But it's also fundamentally limiting in character: all policy acts to constrain people’s actions in some way, and as such, will inevitably sometimes hinder actions we’d like them to take. And of course, when used poorly, policy can directly stifle creativity and wellbeing.
By changing the way we think about what "good policy" is, and limiting its power to force us into rigid conceptual models, we can avoid a lot of that - and it's important that we do.
The good outcomes that organisations want - the clever ones that make progress and come from getting things done in unexpectedly effective ways - usually require some creativity. That might not be true if we're content to just crank the handle, doing the same old thing, and getting by on our past successes and innovations. But for everyone else, enabling creative work is an important part of success.
One of the things that people need to do creative, clever things is enough freedom of action. When people's freedom to try new things is so constrained that it's not worth the pain, their creative spark dies quite quickly, and some of the organisation's potential dies along with it.
Of course, we don't want people to have too much freedom of action. The possibility always exists that people will race past the good experiments that the organisation wants and into doing Bad Things that it definitely doesn't. And we must remain alert to the risk of people deliberately doing bad things. So some restriction of people's freedom is a necessary part of good governance. And thus is born "policy"1.
But this is an impossible balance. No policy can prevent only the bad things that the organisation doesn't want while also enabling all the potential, yet-to-be-imagined good things that it does. To do so would require knowledge of the future and a perfect model of the way that the organisation works and interacts with the world, neither of which is possible.
Good policy minimises this effect by being regularly updated and narrow in scope, but it's not possible to avoid it completely. There's almost always a context (absent the extremes) in which something a policy prohibits would in fact be beneficial. The more time that passes, the more policies there are and the more rigidly they are enforced, the more this becomes inevitable - especially as policies start to overlap and interact in unpredictable ways.
When in this sort of situation there's a temptation just to set policy aside, or to have some sort of bonfire of red tape. But Chesterton's Fence looms large. A spree of policy-burning is generally not the right answer. And there's an emotional component too: when a policy gets in the way, is that a genuinely unjustifiable obstacle to us doing the right thing, or just an aggravating impingement on something we feel entitled to do but aren't? To my mind, the former category is often true, but it's mostly the latter one that causes columnists to fulminate in the Telegraph. The resulting stereotype is unfortunate, and unhelpful.
So we find ourselves in a bit of a pickle. Every organisation's body of policies, to some degree, gets in the way of the things it wants to do. We can't just delete them, DOGE-style, because that would be irresponsible. And we can't just ignore them either, because that would amount to the same thing. Policies must have some force, or they are useless.
I'd like to argue that our policies should be forceful in setting out clear expectations for behaviour and decisions, but also flexible in how those expectations are applied. Force without flexibility becomes rigid bureaucracy; flexibility without force becomes arbitrary and confusing. Good policies occupy the space where both coexist. They should avoid setting acontextual rules and requirements: things that must happen, or must not happen, no matter the context or circumstances. They should avoid setting rules that arise more from preference than necessity, or for situations where the risk being managed is, on a balanced assessment, not particularly serious.
But even written in this way, we can't avoid the trap. No policy we can write can exclude all the bad and enable all the good. All policy lives in this nebulous middle-space, where its applicability, usefulness, meaning and value all depend on the circumstances and the intent of the people involved. And for this reason, it's important for all policy to be flexibly interpreted.
I think we should normalise the idea that while ignoring policy is not ok, wisely and creatively interpreting it in the context of the situation at hand is a good thing2. We should make normal the idea that while we should generally abide by policy, it's sometimes ok not to: as long as that's done honestly, in the open, with transparency, discussion and the knowledge of others. As leaders, we should design our policies assuming that teams have strong values to guide them when policy shouldn’t prevail, and a culture of work that empowers people to get stuck in, radiate intent, be bold, and get good things done. We should do that even if we are not in an organisation with those values and that culture, because that's part of how those things grow3.
We should do all this in part because the benign circumvention of policy happens anyway, all around us, all the time, in secret. There is so much to learn just by making it happen in the open, and we can use what we learn to make better policies - and better cultures.
Like Shadow IT, pulling what's currently done in the shadows into the light would teach us a lot about how teams work, what they need, and how we as organisations and leaders can enable them better.
By "policy" here, I mean the complete body of rules and processes that govern people's behaviour in organisations. These are generally written down, but often - like our famously unwritten constitution - much of it is also habit, convention and received wisdom. These can be just as powerful and are often worse, because the inability to cite them also makes them much harder to dismantle.
One could argue that a better alternative is just to have a senior person who can sign off exceptions to policy, and that’s not a bad thing to have: but let's not build structures that depend on it. It's brittle and centralising, it doesn't demonstrate trust, it's a failure of delegation that will ultimately turn something that we hope will enable more positive cultures of work into more bureaucratic box-ticking: just watch how quickly that policy would turn into a new form on the intranet...
For organisations in this place, "trust and verify" has to be a central principle - while the values and culture are growing, leaders need to know what's going on, spot decisions that are not expressions of the right values and culture, and rapidly and publicly change them as examples to all.