Humanizing Rules

CHAPTER 4WHAT IS THE JOB?

There Are Rules, and There Are Rules

We often think of all compliance outcomes as the same; rules, you might say, are rules. Yet, in reality, what we are trying to achieve in one situation can often be very different to another. Sometimes, we'll need people to complete a task to a particular standard. In others, we'll need them to do something, even when no one is watching. It would be more apt to say that there are rules, and there are rules!

In this chapter, I will illustrate that when we think about the “job” we're trying to do, that can mean very different things. First, by looking at two things governments asked us all to do during the COVID pandemic. On the face of it, they're both compliance requirements. Yet, when we look at the detail, there are enormous differences. Second, by looking in more detail at training. It's something we use as a catch‐all tool, yet the outcomes we need and it can deliver, can be broad. Or, to put it another way, there is training, and there is training.

COVID Compliance

The COVID pandemic has been the world's largest‐ever compliance experiment. For the first item ever, virtually everyone on the planet was asked to comply with new sets of rules. It was also the world's largest behavioural science experiment. Not just how people responded to governments but also how governments responded to the pandemic itself.

For academics like Professor Yuval Feldman, who specialises in behavioural law – the intersection between ...