Sometimes the answer is to subvert the rule instead of breaking it.
Anarchy post #5 or something - enough of you have been super sweet about being inspired and hopeful in the tags of my other posts that you’ve encouraged me to share more of my personal ideology.
So there are good and bad rules out there, and I have a personal analysis I go through to make that determination for myself:
Does the rule achieve its intent?
Is the rule enforceable?
Does the rule disproportionately affect certain people?
Does the rule cause people unreasonable/unnecessary stress?
A good rule is “Yes,” “Yes,” “No,” and “No” - any deviation from that suggests the rule should be ignored, modified, or abolished, but you won’t always (or often) have the ability/power to do that. If you’ve encountered a bad rule, you can decide to break it or take the path of trying to convince the relevant authority to amend or remove the rule, but there is a third option! You can subvert the rule.
I’ll give you a quick example of a good rule: You need to wear safety goggles when working with power tools in the woodshop. What is the rule trying to achieve? It’s trying to keep you safe in the event of an accident. Does wearing safety goggles help protect your eyes? Yes. Is the rule enforceable? Yeah, if you’re the woodshop manager, you can easily walk around and see if someone isn’t wearing goggles and ask them to either put them on or step out of the shop. Does this rule disproportionately affect certain people? No, anyone who is able to use power tools should also be able to wear safety goggles. They make ones that go over glasses too. Does this cause unreasonable/unnecessary stress? As long as you keep some spares on hand for people to use (which pretty much every woodshop does), no one should be stressed by this. Good rule.
Now here’s an example of a rule that I determined to be bad and what I did about it: My college science department has a policy that if you don’t show up appropriately dressed for lab (i.e. long pants, lab coat, goggles, and close-toed shoes) and can’t change and get back within 20 minutes of the lab start time, you will get a zero for that lab. There are only 10 labs per year, so that’s kind of a big deal. Issue: People often just forget they have lab in the afternoon, especially during the hot months and come to lab in shorts. They rarely forget to bring their lab coat and goggles or wear close-toed shoes, but people frequently forget about long pants. What does this rule seek to achieve? Making sure everyone comes dressed properly for lab. Does it achieve this? Nope. You can’t disincentivize forgetting, so no matter how extreme the punishment is, students will forget from time to time. You can’t punish forgetfulness out of a person. Is the rule enforceable? Yeah, people do get turned away from lab if they’re not wearing long pants. Does it disproportionately affect a certain group of people? Yep! Students who live off campus have no hope of getting changed and getting back in 20 minutes, but people living in the dorms across the street can. Does the rule cause unecessary stress?Yep! People used to regularly cry, panic, and beg to trade pants with someone in the big college group chats to avoid getting a zero for lab.
My solution: Take away the rule’s power to stress people by accommodating instead of punishing. I got six pairs of pants in sizes XS to 3XL, wrote “Emergency Lab Pants” on the thighs, and established a box for them in the student common area that anyone could borrow from. This helps people get to lab safely dressed and it provides a safety net that removes the stress of making an easy human mistake.
The reason I went that route was because 1) Breaking the rule and getting away with it was basically impossible and also unsafe. 2) I figured arguing with the department about the policy wouldn’t get anywhere. They’d just ignore that you literally can’t disincentivize forgetting things and go on about people needing to learn to be responsible for themselves or whatever.
And something interesting happened: the department got completely behind this project. They realized it decreased lab absences and provided a change of clothes if someone spilled something on themselves during the lab. Professors put the Emergency Lab Pants box in their syllabi, and the department invested in another set to be kept on hand in the lab offices.
So even though that very harsh rule still exists, it has been divested of its ability to cause people stress and panic - all because somebody analyzed the rule for the first time and determined that it stressed people out while failing to achieve its goal.
