I was standing on the National Mall the other day with a quarter million or so of my close personal friends, wondering, as I’m sure most of the crowd was, “How am I going to justify calling this a business expense on my taxes?”
Then Jon Stewart used drivers merging down to one lane as they enter the Lincoln Tunnel as a metaphor for how we all manage to make things work and it hit me: Link a column to the event and I’m good to go. And what could be a better way to do it than to use cars as a metaphor for … something.
And what could be a better something than corporate policies and standards?
Here’s the premise: Policies and standards are the corporate equivalent of laws and regulations. In many areas, like minimum capital ratios, the question of regulation has become angry and polarized (and think about that for a moment!)
In corporations, the parallel is that policies and standards make employees grumpy while turning HR into bureaucrats. One of the challenges for IT is deciding when they’re needed in spite of the grumpiness and bureaucracy they cause.
If we hit the subject head on we’ll be in danger of banging into existing biases on the subject. But when it comes to driving, the need for some basics is uncontroversial.
So we’ll build on that, using driving to extract some basic principles we can apply more broadly. Here goes:
Case #1 — Merging: It’s Jon Stewart’s example. Basic courtesy and competence are enough. There’s no need for anything more.
Case #2 — Speed: Imagine a wide open highway, with no other cars within miles. There’s no compelling case for any speed limits at all. If you drive too fast the only person you’ll hurt will be yourself and your passengers, who presumably are voluntary participants.
Now imagine rush hour. There’s no need for any speed limits in this situation either, because no matter how hard you might try, you aren’t going to go any faster than traffic allows.
It’s in the in-between situations, when driving too fast is both possible and a danger to others that speed limits matter. Even then, they should be as high as is safe.
Case #3 — Flow: Imagine an intersection. It’s in a relatively unpopulated part of town and very few cars drive through it. There’s no need for a stop sign or traffic light — drivers can figure it out on their own.
Add more traffic, and maybe pedestrians as well, and stop signs are probably a good idea. Without them the best case outcome is gridlock. The worst case is grim.
Add yet more traffic. Stop signs will prevent damage, but flow will be a mess. Put in traffic lights instead … a much more expensive infrastructure to install and maintain … and more cars will get where they’re going faster (in process terms, you’ll improve both cycle time and throughput without reducing quality, which is to say without increasing the number of traffic accidents).
Case #4 — Skills: If the only consequences of not knowing how to drive were personal, it would be just fine for anyone to climb into a car and do whatever they did. There might be a few places left in the U.S. where this would be harmless. Everywhere else, bad drivers … those who don’t know how to operate their vehicles and don’t understand how to behave at, for example, stop signs and stop lights … endanger everyone around them.
And so we require drivers to pass a test of basic competence before they’re allowed on the road.
What are the underlying principles?
1. If you don’t need a policy or standard, don’t have a policy or standard. They’ll just get in the way. Only create and enforce policies and standards when complete freedom of action is likely to cause problems for the business.
2. In simple, low-volume situations, employees can figure things out for themselves. In intermediate situations they need simple, straightforward policies. Complex, high-volume situations are what call for complex and expensive control systems because the alternative is that the system either experiences catastrophic failure or simply grinds to a halt.
3. When incompetence can cause serious harm, require competence and test for it.
If you decide to apply these same principles to your thinking about, say, government regulation, that’s your privilege. This column isn’t about that, though — I’m limiting its scope to commentary on business policies and standards.
The IRS insists.
It would be wonderful to have the freedom to set whatever policies are appropriate using logic and common sense. In many companies, however, there are external requirements. In our case — ISO. So we are required to have policies for things that could never happen and formal structures and auditing of those structures that make no sense. Sound like modern-day politics?
The analogy is a good one, but the speed portion breaks down when you consider the question of insurance. It may seem that a driver on the open road can only harm himself, but if enough drivers cause themselves harm the insurance companies will raise rates, affecting all drivers.
It’s a similar situation to seat belt laws. On the surface, it seems like a silly law, as it protects you from yourself. If you look at it from the perspective of the insurance companies, however, you see that seat belts do prevent many injuries and deaths, reducing the amount of money insurance companies must pay in claims and ultimately benefiting everyone by keeping insurance rates lower.
Are there any issues of scale? Could the same process be used to whittle down tax law without changing the fundamental goals to produce a “minimum necessary IRS”?
Depends on your view of the purpose of the tax code. If it’s purely to provide revenue you end up in a very different place than if you also see it as a public policy tool used to create financial incentives and disincentives for various forms of investment and spending.
I believe the ‘Compentence Party’ is the one single checklist that if applied consistently will put an IT group in a position to succeed.
>There’s no compelling case for any speed limits at all.
Speed limits convey road design standards, too. While there is wiggle room on the upper end, it’s not infinite. I’ve taken my share of 45 mph exit ramps at 60-dropping, but I sure wouldn’t want to hit a 45 mph curve at 80 in a Silverado.
When it comes to IT policy, this would probably be the equivalent of “comment your code,” or “check in everything every night.” At this end of the IT-career-spectrum (ie, started in FORTRAN), I’ve seen enough people not come back to work tomorrow to know that no programmer works completely alone.
>Put in traffic lights instead … a much more expensive infrastructure
And then when you max out the benefit from traffic lights, take them back out and build traffic circles, which are cheaper, self-regulating, and work well at all hours of the day, unlike traffic lights that make law-abiding drivers wait in bad neighborhoods at all hours of the day and night.
In other words, even expensive policies can be improved.
Bob,
You might enjoy reading May’s “In Pursuit of Elegance.” He talks about several “experiments” where city planners removed all the traffic signals/signs from the busiest intersections. The result: accidents down, throughput up. What happened? People couldn’t blame the rules and had to take responsibility for their own actions in the intersection.
The book is a good read.
Thanks for your notes.
Peace.
Interesting points, and I generally agree. However, as far as vehicular traffic is concerned, there are other ways to handle flow at intersections other than installing stop signs and traffic signals. Many state and local departments of transportation in the U.S. are starting to construct roundabouts at intersections instead of the traditional traffic signals. Roundabouts, if designed correctly, can reduce accidents by reducing the number of vehicular conflict points. Also, there are busy interesections in some European countries where jurisdictions have created roundabouts or “village square” arrangements and have removed most traffic signs and all traffic signals, trusing that people (drivers, pedestrians, and bicyclists) will coooperate with each other. The idea is that introducing uncertainty into a traffic situation causes people to slow down and be more observant. Eventually, people get used to sharing the road with other modes of travel. If you get a chance, check out a book titled Traffic: How We Drive and What It Says about Us, by Tom Vanderbilt. Interesting stuff, including information about some counterintuitive approaches, and not an overly technical read.
Bob, Hope you are doing well. I think you have to start with your mission and the image you want to project to determine the amount of governance through polices and standards to maintain your mission and image. I saw a FedEx person using an Enterpise truck yesterday. I guess the mission is to deliver packages on time rather than having FedEx truck.
Not sure I agree with you on this. The mission is what you’re trying to accomplish. One of the most important roles policies and standards play is to establish the boundaries beyond which an employee can’t go to accomplish the mission. The same is true of laws and regulations in the public space.
What? #3 did not include a link to the amazing “11 Rules of Competence?” It should have.
For an intriguing look at how a little change in driving behavior can have a huge impact on traffic web search for ‘trafic waves’ and check out the Science Hobbyist page.
Bob,
Good column. I have to agree with you, the 55 MPH speed limit imposed on us in the 70’s was a bad law. However, it is notable that it too about 15 years to get back to states having the power to set the speed limits on their roads because they knew them better.
Being an adherent of Agile, I am continually pushing at the boundaries of what NEEDS to be done versus what is REQUIRED to be done. Common sense dictates that you get rid of things that are required but not needed.
Oh, and yes, I do still need to buy a copy of “Bare Bones Project Management”, currently I’m just wining it (with ample support from your columns if not from you books :-).
I am not really making a point here, just sharing a perspective.
The premise in Case #3. Flow, implies that the increase in traffic requires more, and more complex regulation. Let me offer you my experience with traffic in Chinese cities.
I have not driven in China, but I have been a passenger. Their way of driving scared me to no end. I did not understand how people were not constantly running into each other and wrecking a lot. But accidents were rare.
In the cities I visited, there were no traffic regulation devices like stop signs and lights. I saw a few stop lights, but none of them were working. In one intersection I saw a working light. It was mostly ignored. In fact, it may have been causing problems.
Chinese drive by different rules. If you were to remove all the lights and one ways in New York City, you would have massive gridlocks (and probably shoot outs) with American trained drivers. With Chinese trained drivers, the city would flow.
I would wager that it would still take the same time to go across town with this flow as it does with the regulated flow requiring you to wait for stop lights.
The amazing thing about traffic in China is that a pedestrian can safely cross a busy eight lane street with traffic flowing both directions. All the pedestrian needs to do is pay attention to not blindly step out in front of a vehicle, and then work their way across at a normal walking pace. The drivers are aware enough to not run them over. And of course the pedestrian has to be aware enough to not be run over.
Find yourself going the wrong way? Just make a u-turn. Again, do not blindly turn in front of someone, just assert yourself at the appropriate time and proceed with awareness. Everyone will either weave around you, or pause long enough until they can flow around you.
I surmise, that if you take a Chinese driver and place them in New York City traffic, they will immediately wreck. All of us US folks were absolutely terrified by the driving in China, and by how our drivers maneuvered through the traffic.
It was on my third trip that it finally clicked with me, and I was no longer afraid — maybe still not brave enough to try driving, but no longer afraid.
You see, the rules that they applied to driving are no different then the rules people apply when walking down a crowded sidewalk or across a busy plaza.
When walking through a crowded plaza, everyone has their own destination and proceed at their own pace. Even with people going in different directions, collisions are rare. Somehow everyone communicates, and everyone gets through without incident.
This is how they drive. It is amazing when you think about it.