I read a news story the other day about a Florida high school football coach and one of his players, both of whom have been suspended. The story really illustrated how over-reliance on rules as a method of governing sometimes results in really stupid decisions.
Meet Coach Bill Buldini, a teacher at St. Cloud high school in Osceola County, Florida, and the coach of the high school's football team. Buldini, a while back, found out that one of his players was homeless and living on the street. So he invited the player to move in with him and his family. The school district found out about it, reported it to the Florida High School Athletic Association who promptly opened an investigation. The school, meanwhile has suspended both the coach and the player, and has witheld the portion of the coach's pay that comes from coaching football until the association completes their investigation.
Apparently, in high school sports, it's against the rules for a player to live with the coach or any other administrator or employee of the school. The athletic association has the rule, it seems, to ensure that coaches can't apply undue pressure to student athletes living in their homes. I'm not sure what kind of pressure they're worried about; perhaps the sort of pressure the NCAA alleged Sandra Bullock's character applied to the young man she took into her home in the movie, "The Blind Side". In the movie (which is based on a true story), the NCAA investigates Bullock's character and her husband after allegations arose that they pushed a teenaged football player living in their home to play football at their alma mater.
I guess that's a bad deal; teenagers should be allowed to make their own choices when it comes to if--and where--they play football. And it would truly be a horrible thing for a coach to take someone into their home, and then use that kindness as a way of unfairly influencing the student athlete in some way. So, if that's the reason the athletic association instituted the rule, then whomever dreampt it up probably had great intentions.
But in its current manifestation, it appears as though the athletic association would rather their student athletes be homeless than safe in a coaches' home! Absolutely absurd.
Here's the thing: rules like this really paint situations as black and white, when in reality, many things aren't very black and white at all. Is it a good thing for coaches to take student athletes into their homes? Perhaps, in some cases, it's not. In this case, though, it was a great thing: a homeless kid now has a place to live. How is that bad?
But there's a rule. And that rule prohibits this. So coach Buldini can either kick the kid out of his home, or lose his job and pay hefty fines. In this case, the rule is an unbelievably stupid rule.
One option, then, is to try to think of all the possible exceptions to the rule. This is the tact our government has taken. Create a rule that we acknowledge doesn't work perfectly in all situations, then try to identify and account for every possible exception.
If you think about it, that's kinda foolish too, isn't it? From a practical perspective, we end with millions of pages of rules and their corresponding exceptions, and there's no way any single person could ever hope to understand all of the rules and the exceptions, which brings with it its own set of inefficiencies.
The irony is that, most of these rules really come down to one of just a handful of basic principles. For example, the Florida atheletic association is probably really concerned with coaches taking advantage of players--something we all agree is a bad thing. So instead of trying to identify all of the ways a coach might try to take advantage of a player, and then create rules and contingencies for each, why can't we just say, "Don't take advantage of players--and if you do, you lose your job"? Of course, each individual case would then have to be judged on its merits, a prospect that is admittedly messy (instead of reading a rule a la "no players living with coaches" we have to study the situation, and determine whether or not, in fact, the coach was attempting to take advantage of the player).
Applying it to organizations, it gets a little easier. From a practical perspective, is it generally enough, in a company, to tell your employees to, "do the right thing" and to "treat customers well" and to "spend money wisely"? Don't most people have a decent idea of what that means?
Seems like a much more efficient way of running an organization to me...
