The problem with legislating edge cases.
A club I’m in recently instituted a new policy about facility use. When it was announced by email, I couldn’t quite make sense of it, because it directly undermined club members’ participation in an activity the club wanted to encourage.
At the next meeting, I tried to excavate the reason for the new policy. I asked, Why do we need this policy? The response was that the policy makes sure we’re all on the same page. So I tried again: What happened? What prompted it?
And the answer transported me instantly back in time to graduate school.
One of the required courses for my doctorate was a course on policymaking. While the course was the most boring I’ve ever experienced, it did leave me with one piece of wisdom for my good-advice-for-leaders hall of fame:
Don’t legislate edge cases.
Legislating edge cases means creating rules to address a problem caused by a relative few. One person abuses the company credit card, and management rolls out a new expense policy. Someone repeatedly fails to clean up after using the office kitchen, and a laminated list of rules appears above the microwave and the coffee maker. Daily random check-in Zooms begin after a manager discovers one remote worker seems repeatedly AWOL.
In the case of my club, one or two people were repeatedly signing up for facility use at a peak time, preventing others from accessing those time slots. Instead of a quick conversation with those people, leadership wrote a rule that burdened everyone else.
This is policymaking as a substitute for confronting the person directly. It’s easy to rationalize because it feels responsible. After all, we’re just closing a loophole. It also feels prudent because it proactively deals with a future miscreant, not just the current one.
This form of conflict avoidance is not without costs, though: Time and effort to craft and police the new policy. Resentment from the majority who now have extra work (extra forms, extra zoom meetings) because of someone else’s poor choices. Complexity added to everyone’s day. And the inadvertent culture lesson that when behavior gets difficult, the organization’s response is bureaucratic rather than direct.
Before writing new policy, this question helps check our impulses:
Are we relying on a rule to avoid confronting a person?
And these secondary questions also help us navigate the fork in the road:
- Is this relief, or is this good policy?
- If the person left tomorrow, would this policy still need to exist?
- Will the new rule create more value than the downsides it creates?
None of this is to say policy is the enemy. Sometimes a rule change is genuinely needed. Sometimes a policy change is warranted as a companion to the conversation. The key is to notice the difference between writing policy because it’s needed and retreating to policy because confrontation feels hard.
Over to you
- Can you think of a policy that wouldn’t have been needed if a conversation had happened instead?
- Have you been on the receiving end of a policy that felt like it was really about someone else? What, if anything, could you do about it?
- Have you been in the position of choosing policymaking over confronting? What prompted the decision not to approach them?
- Is your policy handbook getting thick with edge-case policies?