Humanizing Rules

CHAPTER 28A IS ALSO FOR ANALYTICAL

Introduction

The fourth radar of the framework is “Analytical”. It encourages us to look for instances where our employees pay a lot of attention to our rule. For example, they're asking us lots of questions about it, or the page on which the rule appears on the intranet receives significantly more traffic than similar pages.

If we can find out why people are paying more attention to the rule – in other words, why they're analysing it – we can understand whether this is happening for positive or negative reasons and react accordingly.

Rationale

The reasons we want to explore why people are looking in detail at our rule are most simply illustrated by a familiar plot you'll recognise from the movies. In The Great Humanizing Rules Robbery, an imaginary film I've just invented, the main protagonists are a gang who are – the clue was in the title! – planning a robbery. This requires them to scope out a secure facility, which conveniently happens also to run visitor tours.

The gang disguise themselves as tourists and join a visitor tour. What we know, but the tour guide does not, is that she is about to guide two very different types of visitors. There are genuine tourists who will ask questions because they're interested and fake ones who will do so to find weaknesses in the facility's security that they can later exploit.

We experience broadly similar dynamics when our employees pay attention to our rules. As the fictional movie plot illustrates, ...