How - Dov Seidman [48]
WE ARE AMBIVALENT ABOUT RULES
We know we need some and we want others to play by them, but we say, “Rules are meant to be broken.”
RULES ARE REACTIVE
They respond to past events.
RULES ARE BOTH OVER- AND UNDERINCLUSIVE
Because they are proxies, they cannot be precise.
PROLIFERATION OF RULES IS A TAX ON THE SYSTEM
Few people can remember them all.
We lose productivity when we stop to look them up.
RULES ARE TYPICALLY PROHIBITIONS
They speak to can and can’t.
We view them as confining and constricting.
RULES REQUIRE ENFORCEMENT
With laxity,they lose credibility and effectiveness.
They necessitate expensive bureaucracies of compliance.
RULES SPEAK TO BOUNDARIES AND FLOORS
BUT CREATE INADVERTENT CEILINGS
We can’t legislate “The sky’s the limit.”
THE ONLY WAY TO HONOR RULES IS TO OBEY THEM EXACTLY
They speak to coercion and motivation.
The inspiration to excel must come from somewhere else.
TOO MANY RULES BREEDS OVERRELIANCE
We think, “If it mattered, they would have made a rule.”
This presents us with a question: In a fast-changing world, is there a way to govern human behavior that proactively embraces change?
Despite Winston Churchill’s quip that democracy is the worst system of government except all the others, it does work. But it works as a social contract because democratic countries are not founded on a set of rules, but rather on a set of shared values, on constitutions. Constitutions are powerful documents because they are filled with the values and principles of the people they govern, such as free expression, liberty, enfranchisement, fairness, justice, the pursuit of happiness, or the rule of law. These core, foundational values can be interpreted and reapplied to new situations as they arise. The more profound the document, the more durably it can adapt to changing times. The key to long-term, sustained success does not lie in breaking all the rules; it lies in transcending the rules and harnessing the power of values.
ON THE TIP OF YOUR TONGUE
To fully understand how limited we can be by our overreliance on rules, let’s examine for a minute how they affect the way we think. To do that, we must consider the process of language. When you invest yourself in a relationship to rules, you invest yourself in their language as well, and language exerts a powerful influence on the way we think. Most people believe, for instance, that words follow thought: Something occurs to you and then you find the words to express it. In fact, studies have shown that the exact opposite is true; we think in language. The greater our vocabulary and command of the syntax of language becomes, the more refined and nuanced becomes our cognition. If, for instance, you knew only two words to describe a surface, hard and soft, you would be likely to classify it only in one of two ways. The whole world would be hard or soft, and all the degrees of hardness—firm, rigid, stiff, supportive—and all the different kinds of softness—spongy, fleecy, downy, satiny—would tend not to occur to you. You conceive of those qualities mostly because you know the words for them, or, to be more precise, according to linguists, you are more likely to make certain kinds of assessments because of the nature of the language you speak. Although Indian philosopher Bhartrihari first argued this idea in the fifth century C.E., modern linguists call it the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, derived from the work of linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir and his colleague and student Benjamin Whorf.11 They posited a systematic relationship between the grammatical categories of the language a person speaks and how that person both understands the world and behaves within it. As Sapir put it, “We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.”12
To see how language influences the way we solve problems, consider these two examples and the way a predisposition to certain