Dilbert to Level 9
Most rules emerge from the bottom up. They are products of individual efforts to create order in work. By order, I mean the betterment some aspect of production like safety, quality, reliability, etc. These bottom up rules are organic rules. Organic rules are born as vibes and the successful ones die as protocols.
Rules attempt to squeeze randomness out of a system. People dislike uncertainty. An uncertain future is a mushy future – it feels unstable and is therefore a poor foundation for planning. One way to create hardness is through rulemaking or protocolization.1
This search for hardness can get out of hand. If you think about rules as organic metaphysical matter, they constitute somewhat of an invasive species. Nature, our base environment, is a setting with the protocol dial turned to 0. It’s just wilderness. On the flip side you have places where even a slightly feral human would fear to work. Places where the protocol dial is turned to ~9, like the U.S. Postal Service or Deloitte’s Accounting division.
Level 0 and level 9 environments are almost equally “wild” in the sense that they are highly selective. You can’t live long in either place without being well adapted. Which is why, IMHO, it’s a good idea to strive for a middle ground. And there is a person whose job it is to keep us there.
Unmanagers
From my experience, managers create few rules relative to subordinates. Usually a manager will come into their position inheriting a lot of rules. Their job is to decide which ones to keep and, more importantly, which ones to get rid of.
A good manager upholds rules and morale. A great one is also a purveyor of well-dosed anarchy; a reaper of tired protocols; a hot knife through red tape. They are unmanagers.
If you’re an individual contributor in a bureaucracy, you want to work for an effective unmanager. Someone that creates vacuums in overly protocolized space. This can massively speed up operations. That said, you need a baseline level of rules or else your unit would get armbarred by HR. What you need is minimum effective management (MEM).
Flat organizations, which are having a renaissance due to a tight fiscal environment, require an active unmanager to maintain MEM. Keeping your protocol dial low is important in creative business models as well. While protocols serve as a tool to create certainty, too much leads to ossification. If you’re trying to move fast and/or break things, rigidity kills your operating model.
Protocols are a network’s backbone. You need some, but not too much. Think fluid fossils.
Framework Junkies
Another contributing factor to rule overgrowth is the wealth of freshly minted MBAs, BCOMs, JDs, and other breeds of framework junkies.2 All of whom come into workplaces armed with big ideas and little experience.
Usually, those ideas involve adding new rules. A major weakness of professionals from these backgrounds is their lack of context. They’re familiar with “universal”, best-in-class management systems, but don’t have a rich understanding of the workplace they’re going into. Without taking the time to build and internalize a thick description of their new workplace, their rulemaking efforts look a lot like this:
The result is bloatware. A bunch of blocks that don’t really fit, but also don’t seem to go away. Closely related corporate metafauna include: zombie projects, analysis paralysis loops, and administrative bloat.
A major problem with unmanagement is that it’s risky. Protocols are enforced by incentives and disincentives. Killing them has costs, and many people prefer “the devil you know”. Framework junkies also have the upper hand in terms of legibility. Their work is visible and looks smart.
My Machiavellian advice: it is better (and easier) to trim rules when they are in the vibe stage of their lifecycle.
And you must know the reason for old protocols before you get rid of them.3
Afterthoughts
This idea of unmanaging is adjacent to a host of other things that have caught my attention recently. Stop signs, airplane crash investigations, overconsumption, ecological preservation… At the core of many of these topics lies a touchy problem: how do we get things to not happen?
It might be an exercise in splitting hairs, but what if we distinguished between coerced action and coerced inaction? This dichotomy might already have a name in command and control. Where a command is an order to do something, a control is an order not to do something.
I am a recovering framework junkie.
