Humanizing Rules

CHAPTER 25R IS FOR REBELLIOUS

Introduction

The first radar of the framework is “Rebellious”, which encourages us to look at situations where our employees are breaking the rules. The radar's simple logic is that if they aren't doing what we want them to, then there's an opportunity to explore why.

On the face of it, this might seem rather obvious. Why on earth, you might rightly think, do we need a radar to tell us that we have an issue when people are breaking our rules?! The answer is that we don't. At least not for the things we know about. However, we need the radar because when it comes to noncompliance, we often only explore a subset of it. Or, to put it another way, what we see may not be all there is!

Rumsfeldian Analysis

I'll explain what I mean with a quote from former US Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld. It's so famous that mentioning Rumsfeld's name might be a clue for some readers as to where I'm going with this. It's something he said over twenty years ago, in February 2002. Since it appeared to be an attempt to evade answering a question in a press conference, what Rumsfeld said was widely ridiculed at the time. However, outside the political context in which he made it, the comment seems far more insightful:

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.

Let's examine ...