I’ve just sat through a couple of presentations on basic security and fire awareness. I expect anyone who is a member of a large organization has to do it regularly because that organization has a ‘duty of care’ and needs to be seen to be ticking the boxes. In the room were a whole bunch of students we have recruited for a university air squadron. I tried to watch the presentation with my empathy head on. Did all the jargon and abbreviations make sense? What was the assumed level of knowledge? Did the students walk out of the room better informed to the tune of 2 hours’ worth of air time ? Had the appropriate boxes been ticked? I suspect only the last answer could truthfully be ‘yes’. I asked a few students after the event what their experience was. Surprisingly they already knew about fire exits and protocol and they hadn’t had any such brief in their halls of residence.

It reminded me of a coaching presentation I went to a while ago given by a neuroscientist and education consultant. She had been asked by a company to review their learning and development package. It was all ‘on line’. The staff had to read the information and then tick boxes to show they could remember what they had just read. This consultant took one look at the course and nearly laughed as it was wholly inappropriate. She was pleased she stifled her mirth: the company had complete faith in the programme, yet in her opinion it was totally the wrong way to teach the manual skills…or indeed any skills. She relayed this story to us as a way of illustrating the benefit of understanding how we learn. Unfortunately, as I suggested to a general chorus of teeth sucking, a lot of companies aren’t interested in educating their staff: merely ticking the appropriate boxes.

The same happened to me when I was in Jordan with the British military. We had to do a bit of driving on the local roads. As Jordanians drive on the left someone had decided that we should all take the European driving matrix test: a multiple choice test of our knowledge of the highway codes in north west Europe, specifically tailored for servicemen driving to and from their former bases in Germany. The test was really picky and it took all of us about 3 hours to find a fully correct solution. The Jordanian roads bore barely any likeness. Rights of way were, at best, arbitrary and traffic progressed through the capital, Amman, with a sort of Brownian motion. As I was cut up on a roundabout for the eight time I felt really pleased that I knew the Dutch rules for carrying children in the front seat.
I have no doubt that the aspiration behind legislation is thoroughly admirable but but sometimes the thinking seems to be flawed or badly applied. There is a natural tension between safety and output and this tension needs to be maintained, just like a suspension bridge or trampoline. Without safety legislation a company’s output becomes all encompassing. Safety legislation is there to protect the work force but quite a few managers try and avoid their responsibilities by shifting all the work onto the work force. In bureaucracies, without any valid measure of output, safety legislation swamps any focus on the output and again the hierarchy gently shifts the workload to the workforce.

Equality and diversity legislation is subtly different. Most bureaucracies think their responsibilities stop when they have taught the workforce about not discriminating against each other. Diversity, though, as the smart agile companies have discovered, is about far more: embracing the diversity of ideas, values and thinking that the employees bring to the company. Legislation says you must treat everyone equally; common sense says you should celebrate the differences.

It’s just a thought. Next time you’re tempted to lay down a rule, stop and ask yourself what you’re trying to achieve or prevent. Achieving something is about employing the growth mindset; rules are superfluous. Preventing or stopping something is a fixed mindset approach which leads eventually to stagnation.