Imagine that a person who has just signed a new set of regulations must tomorrow stand in line and follow them. Without an official ID, personal connections, or phone calls that get done in five minutes what takes others an entire day.
Let them spend seven days filling out the forms they prescribed, collecting the certificates they required, and waiting for responses within the deadlines they themselves set. I believe that within the very first week, they would discover things that weren’t even mentioned in a single explanation of that regulation.
On paper, everything usually looks in order. Responsibilities are assigned, steps are listed, deadlines are precise. The person who designs the procedure sees a system. The person who has to work within it sees how many times they must leave their workstation, to whom they must explain the same problem again, and how much it will cost them to complete something that was simple just yesterday.
And this is where injustice often arises—an injustice we cannot even measure. The person who wrote the regulation finishes their job when it is adopted. For the person who applies it, the work is only just beginning.
When it becomes clear that the system isn’t working, we first look for the fault in people. They didn’t read the instructions carefully. They didn’t bring the right paperwork. They don’t understand. They resist change. Rarely do we first ask ourselves whether we’ve even tried to do what we’re asking of them.
I don’t think rules are unnecessary. Without them, there would be neither accountability nor equal treatment. But a rule that saves time for those in charge while robbing those who do the work of time every day deserves serious scrutiny. As does a rule that supposedly applies equally to everyone, while some have a way to get around it.
That is why I would require seven days under one’s own rules as a test before those rules are put into practice. Let the decision-maker go to the service counter, to the warehouse, out into the field, or among the people whose work they regulate. Let them try it without special treatment. Not to humiliate them, but so they can understand what a report will never show.
And then I’d ask them just one thing:
Would you agree to work like this every day?
If not, why do you expect others to?
The biggest problem isn’t that we sometimes adopt bad regulations. Mistakes can be corrected.
The problem is that those who make them can carry on with their lives as if nothing has happened, while others must live with the consequences of those decisions for years.
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