The Rule of Procedures

No procedure can replace good leadership.
Nor can any set of laws replace simple courtesy.

There are good procedures and there are bad procedures. But an experienced person knows that the procedures don’t matter. I had a chance to review a recent study of why projects succeed and fail and noticed some curious results. The study found the major cause for success was the right people with the right skills were involved. The reasons for failure legion and only mentioned people in connection with more environmental circumstances.

An amateur blames his tools, a craftsman blames himself.

A good leader will succeed even with bad procedures and a poor manager will fail even with the best procedures. However, good procedures will make it easier to succeed and remove a lot of stress from the process.

For some reason, management assumes that any problem can be fixed with the proper procedure in place. There are even international standards based on establishing procedures. But how does this fit with the ultimate act of rebellion—following the procedures EXACTLY.

If procedures are so effective, why is following the rules so devastating?

Hmmm, perhaps we need to write a procedure to fix that problem.

In the 1932, Gödel developed his incompleteness theorem. Among other things, it proved that for every hypothesis there is an infinite number of axioms. Life is ever so much more ill defined and messy than math, but we seem to think that we can write the ultimate procedure.

“We need people who can follow the procedures!”
“We need people who can think out of the box!”

I often wonder if the people who say these things actually listen to the words that come out of their mouths.

Procedures are the box!

The Law of Resources applies here. Time spent keeping track of a procedure is non-productive time. This does not mean having procedures are wrong. A good procedure can allow an inexperienced person to succeed in a new field. However, it is foolish to think any procedure can ever replace responsible actions.

When something goes wrong, the first response of management is to implement a new procedure. I followed a different rule:

Never implement a permanent solution for a temporary problem.

Probably one of the reasons I was successful as a Command Sergeant Major and never made it into management as a civilian.