There's surprisingly little written about the existence of rules in our society. Graeber's Utopia of Rules reminds my favorite. At the end of the book is also his essay on laws and superheroes (specifically in Nolan's Batman trilogy).
"So, laws emerge from illegal activity. This creates a fundamental incoherence in the very idea of modern government, which assumes that the state has a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence (only the police, or prison guards, have the legal right to beat you up)"
There should be a optimal balance between rules and discretion. As described , in a big org , rules are necessary. But the success will depend on how the workforce follow the rules understanding the spirit behind them...
Interesting parallel re linguistics, since it's also a complex adaptive system. And exactly re the rules cycle, and what this tells us is that organisations too have a useful life, beyond which radical change or planned senescence is needed.
There's surprisingly little written about the existence of rules in our society. Graeber's Utopia of Rules reminds my favorite. At the end of the book is also his essay on laws and superheroes (specifically in Nolan's Batman trilogy).
"So, laws emerge from illegal activity. This creates a fundamental incoherence in the very idea of modern government, which assumes that the state has a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence (only the police, or prison guards, have the legal right to beat you up)"
There should be a optimal balance between rules and discretion. As described , in a big org , rules are necessary. But the success will depend on how the workforce follow the rules understanding the spirit behind them...
Reading this I thought there may be a "rules cycle" in organizations. Most organizations start with no rules, relying on discretion.
Discretion does not scale and relies on specific people -> implement simple rules
Simple rules are imperfect and vulnerable to Goodharting -> implement more and more complex rules
Rules become too many and too rigid -> discretion is needed again to scale back rules and revitalise the org
It sounds like the theory in linguistics about languages cycling between different morphologies (isolating, agglutinating and inflectional).
Interesting parallel re linguistics, since it's also a complex adaptive system. And exactly re the rules cycle, and what this tells us is that organisations too have a useful life, beyond which radical change or planned senescence is needed.