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Rule Observatory
A World without Rules
by Silvie Spreeuwenberg
On the cover of a flyer that announces a Seminar, the word 'rules' caught my eye
-- rule fanatic as I am -- and I read the sentence:
| Free your organization from more management and rules, get out of the spiral. |
I opened the flyer and read on. A Management Guru, Professor in Knowledge
Management, a 'Chief Emotions Officer', and a number of experienced customers would
teach me how a company can profit from improved productivity and reduced costs, with
fewer rules and more craftmanship.
Wow, I need to know more about this! In my profession I always see organizations
that create more rules to improve productivity and reduce costs. So I read
on:
| Organizations want to control everything. They rather work with laymen that
follow the procedures and protocols, than with craftsmen that are able to reason
for themselves. Everything is put into formats, procedures, rules, and competence
models ... |
Exactly, that is what I encounter when I am talking with clients.
No, you can't blame me for that.... But I read on:
| Without craftsmanship, measuring performance and expressing performance in numbers
is becoming more and more important. |
Yes, indeed, even the effects of an improved management of rules has to be measured,
and that is far from trivial. I try to imagine a world without rules:
"I enter a bank to apply for a new loan; I have a good chat with the bank
employee; he looks deep into my eyes, and my loan application is approved."
In this world without rules I probably have another profession.
And I wonder if this world would be a fair world, respecting equality of rights.
Would this world end like the 'state of nature' described by the philosopher Thomas
Hobbes: '...a state without civil government, ... in a war of all against all
in which life is hardly worth living'? Or will the dream of his counterpart
Jean-Jacques Rousseau be realized?
The question 'In what reorganization do you currently work?' will
not surprise anybody. We keep on trying to improve our rules and we should
even care much more. Only then we can discover that some rules can be simplified
and that fewer rules with higher quality may lead to the same, or even better, results.
But a world without rules.... I cannot imagine.
|
Drs. Silvie Spreeuwenberg has a background in artificial intelligence and is the
co-founder and director of LibRT. LibRT helps customers assess and improve
the quality of their business rules. Silvie's experience with business rules
modeling has resulted in the development of tools and techniques to increase the
quality of business rules. She writes, "We believe that one should focus
on quality management of business rules to make full profit of the business rules
approach." LibRT is located in the Netherlands; for more information
visit