I believe in rules. If they aren't one-sided...

I believe in rules.

If they are fair...

If they don’t protect bullies...

If they aren’t designed to prevent progress...

If they aren’t one-sided...

Then I believe in rules. 

If This, Then That. Rules reflect their creator, whether encoded in technology or otherwise. 

If you were in a building that was on fire with the elevators out, would you stand still and wait for permission to run down the badge-only staircase? 

Quite obviously not. 

If your company’s ethics course advised you of your obligation to report any evidence of harassment, but you knew someone who reported harassment was subtly derailed in their career… would you report it when you saw something? 

Maybe, but not without pause.

You weigh the consequences of breaking or following a rule constantly; the probability of the consequence is sometimes harder to foresee. 

99% of rules are invented to prevent wrong things, not to promote right things. 

We have prisons, fines, and penalties. We have processes and approvals, negative news, and a whole lot of “Don’t”s. We put up guardrails and bumper lanes with far more dire penalties for acting against than rewards for acting in accordance. When we do promote good behavior, it is often ridiculous or puerile - top earners, peer thanks awards, pats on the head. 

And, the creators of the rules - and associated consequences - are typically the ones who benefit from the outcomes. With too many examples to choose from, let’s look at just one: Bombshell, a movie examining the sexual harassment cases at Fox News exposing the CEO Roger Ailes. The rules to prevent the wrong things were ineffective because the rules to benefit the leaders were the ones upheld. The system to encourage, uplift, or reward the right things didn’t exist. And, sadly, as the cases were settled, the payouts to the studio heads were multiples more than to the victims. So, who was punished and who was rewarded?

When we examine businesses that have grown stale with corporate bureaucracy, you can see the untended garden of processes now impenetrable to innovation. Innovation is good risk, but systems designed to prevent risk can’t tell the difference. 

“Bureaucracy is the art of making the possible impossible.” - Javier Pascual Salcedo

Tech is human, human is tech. 

You could theorize that technology should be able to neutralize what humans must instead govern. However, the code that is written into the algorithms, the corpuses of content used to train the models, are like the food that feed artificial intelligence. Like any other system, including human systems, if you ingest garbage… you will look like, feel like, and likely create similar garbage. 

Consider the now-infamous Microsoft bot that has a short lived run on Twitter before it devolved through self-iteration into a racist biased content creator and had to be shut down. The rules it was given may have been neutral enough - Twitter character lengths, appropriate posting time and span, the routines to publish a post, or reply to comments - but the content it was ingesting across the existing Twitter corpus turned it into a degrading derivative mirror of the human generated content.

In other cases, implicit or unconscious bias (by definition the owner of the bias is unaware) is built right into the rules, the algorithms, the models. A few years ago, Amazon had to retire a recruiting tool that was biased against women. It favored language that was more often found on men’s resumes. Because the tech industry is male-dominated, the successful hire data they built the system on largely reflected male content. The recruiting system that was intended to be a neutral evaluator instead became a tool for perpetuating bias.

Now we see companies creating governance against this kind of encoded bias with ethical committees and Chief Ethics Officers. Just like the human systems of rules requiring governing/enforcing bodies, we have developed a similar system for technology. In both cases, we have to ask how we avoid compounding the fault lines, creating further layers of bureaucracy rather than efficiency?

1. Design for good. I’m not suggesting we ignore that we need systems to prevent bad things, but what if we reframed the thinking? What if we looked first for ways to psychologically encourage and reward good behaviors? Because I know a virtuous business is possible, I’m ruined for anything less. Whether it is tech giants, film studios, or even governments, I can’t say we should agree to rules that protect their creators at the expense of the individual because there is no possible fair fight. Intimidation, bullying... I must believe the winners will be the virtuous. Let’s build rules that foster the right things to happen at least in equal measure to those that guard against the wrong things. 
2. Recalibrate often. Let’s be willing to recalibrate our own thinking. Would you trade in your current phone for the original iPhone? A lot has changed in technology in the last 10 years. If you wouldn’t accept outdated tech in your phone, why would you accept rules and policies written, for example, about healthcare in that outdated context? As society evolves, rules, laws (and lawmakers), and principles must also evolve, taking into account both the context of the times when the rules were created, and the delta of what has changed since then. 
3. Tune your compass Very few of us blindly follow the rules anyhow. We need to tune in more deeply to our own internal compasses. As Adam Grant might say, we need to constantly rethink. Get comfortable with the question “Why?” - even inside our own heads. Don’t outsource your own compass to the rules, or you risk following Michael Scott into the lake when his car’s GPS told him to turn, despite what his own eyes told him.

“As a general rule, it’s those with greater power who need to do more of the rethinking, both because they’re more likely to privilege their own perspectives and because their perspectives are more likely to go unquestioned.”

― Adam M. Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

So, yes, I believe in rules, and I also believe in rethinking them. 

Have you ever followed a rule and realized it harmed you? Have you ever ignored a rule, and felt you acted with better integrity to your own compass? I’d love to hear in the comments.