- Hello and welcome back.
We're going to talk about rules,
introducing this concept of rules
and what they are in general.
I'm going to give you a different background now.
Can you recognize that?
How about now?
It's the Statue of Liberty with the sun setting.
Okay. Hi everyone, nice to see you.
I'm John Bandler as you know by now.
In this video, we are talking about what a rule is,
and remember, policies and procedures are rules, right?
If you're watching me taking this learning path,
we're trying to figure out how to write, build better,
update better policies and procedures.
And those are rules
and they need to fit within a framework of other rules,
and we're going to talk about that.
I find this very, very interesting.
I think you will too.
So what comes into your mind when you hear the word rules?
What does it mean to you?
It means different things to different people.
We all have experience with rules of all different types.
There are varying perspectives on what a rule is,
varying levels of compliance.
And listen, it's very hard to categorize people.
People don't fit into neat categories.
But if we had to create two categories of people
and how they think about rules,
we might make one rule-abiding there on the left,
and the other might be rebel.
And of course we put 'em in quotes.
And there's a continuum of this, right.
Along this wide continuum,
people might fit in different places,
and it might depend on the time of day or day of the week
and it may depend on the type of rule.
So rule-abiding, we might call some people law-abiding.
Of course, you know it might depend on the circumstances.
There's that golden rule.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Some people might think too many rules,
too many procedures is bureaucratic.
That's got a negative connotation.
Sometimes some people call rule-abiding people squares,
living in that world of nine to five job,
and following the rules.
Along with bureaucratic, call it red tape.
There's so much red tape.
There's so many rules and procedures,
I can't get anything done.
Some people might say too many rules are inefficient.
Some might say we need rules to be efficient.
Some might say, people who are following rules are suckers,
rules are for suckers.
And of course there's a lot of other ways to think about it.
And it all depends,
so that's why I put the question mark there.
I'm just trying to get you thinking about what these mean.
And on the other end, I guess a nice way to call someone
who doesn't like rules is a rebel, or a renegade.
Rule violator, hmm-mm,
gets a little bit more of a negative connotation.
Law breaker generally is not a good connotation.
Criminal, that's someone breaking the criminal laws,
and that generally does not have a good connotation.
Some people say rules are made to be broken.
Some people you might hear 'em say,
better to ask forgiveness than permission.
Sometimes we might say, people who don't care about rules
are putting the interest of themselves
above the interests of society.
People that aren't waiting their turn,
and all other ways to think about it.
Again, we're just getting thinking, what is a rule?
Why do we need them?
What were our first rules as people, as individuals, right?
We came into this world age zero days and zero years,
and eventually we learned some of the first rules.
And from where?
From our parents who controlled our lives.
And eventually we're growing up more consciousness,
what we can eat and when we can have dessert?
Not until we eat our food.
When we have to go to bed,
and all kinds of other rules are coming from where?
The people who raised us, our parents.
Now ultimately, as we start to develop as people,
we create our own personal rules.
Things we will do or things we will not do,
call it our personal code, call it our personal ethics.
And this evolves over time and based on circumstances,
these are the rules we make for ourselves.
And of course it's influenced by all kinds of things,
including our upbringing, including laws,
school rules, all of that.
But we create rules for ourselves.
Sometimes we break our own rules,
sometimes we try to comply, sometimes we ignore.
No person's perfect and we all change.
We're all a work in progress.
What were the earliest rules of the human species, right.
We evolved to a point where we're living in society,
and or a type of society and we're doing certain things,
and those societies have to have some type of rules.
We start living in families, social groups.
Some people are hunting, some are cooking,
some are gathering food, building shelter,
raising offspring, protecting from other humans.
These societal groups start to create rules
'cause without some type of rule,
you can't have a society.
Not that everybody's following the rules all the time,
and not that all the rules are always good,
but as we started to form societies, we had to have rules.
Now, let's think about government rules.
It could be laws, regulations, a decision by a court.
Government makes a lot of rules,
especially in today's modern society.
If you look at all the rules put out by government,
federal and state talking laws enacted into law,
signed by the executive
and regulations created by a regulatory body,
there are a lot of laws and regulations.
And then add court decisions.
So I call that external rules, and I want to introduce you
to the external rules platform.
And we're going to talk about that more later in the course.
And actually, I built an entire course in this learning path
to provide some knowledge about laws and regulations,
to use that in building your policies.
Now, let's think about rules of an organization.
Now I call it internal rules.
It's internal to the organization compared to rules
that come to the organization
from external sources like the government.
And again, this whole learning path is about the creation
of internal rules like policies and procedures.
But I want to introduce this concept
of an internal rules platform and how policies,
procedures, standards fit into that.
Organizations need to create rules to tell themselves,
to tell the organization what to do.
And more practically telling all the individuals
in the organization what to do.
From the newest hire to the CEO, to all the other people,
we got to have some rules so we know what to do.
And I want to share a rule that guidance
and suggestions are not rules.
That's my rule.
If it's guidance, it's not a rule.
If it's a suggestion, it's not a rule.
But we also got to remember there's gray areas.
So I'll add sometimes there's an exception to a rule.
And that is that rules can provide guidance,
and allow for discretion.
And guidance can also help people figure out
how to best follow the rules.
So rules never account for every single circumstance.
Rules rarely say exactly what to do.
There's usually some discretion to interpret the rules,
and to comply with them and to apply them
to varying facts and circumstances.
Now, rules could be one of two things,
or maybe somewhere in between.
A rule could be fair and reasonable.
A rule could provide for discretion and common sense,
or a rule could be unfair and capricious.
So we're talking about the rule.
Obviously we're creating policies
and procedures, they're rules.
We want them to be fair, reasonable,
and a lot of circumstances to provide for discretion,
provide for the employee to use common sense.
And sometimes people will disagree
about whether that rule is fair or unfair.
And we want to distinguish that from this next concept.
And in this concept,
we're thinking about enforcement of rules.
So let's say we've got a fair rule, it's written fairly,
now we're talking about how that rule is enforced.
And that enforcement could be done fairly,
with discretion, and common sense in the enforcement.
Meaning we're also allowing the people subject to the rules
to use a little bit of discretion and common sense
in how they comply with the rules.
Or enforcement could be unfair, it could be rigid,
arbitrary, and capricious.
So the rule might be fair, but we might say,
hey, you're enforcing that unfairly.
So what's an example?
Let's say we all agree that the speed limit is fair,
just went on a driving trip,
speed limit in some states, 70 miles an hour.
I think that's fair.
I think that's...
I don't think people should be going much faster.
So let's agree for the sake of argument
that the speed limit of 70 is a fair rule.
Now imagine there's a state trooper sitting on the highway,
and that state trooper sees people going 80, 90, 90,
80 miles an hour,
and that state trooper ignores all those cars.
And then the trooper sees someone going 72 miles an hour,
just two miles over the speed limit,
pulls that person over for an improper reason,
gives them a ticket for going 72 miles an hour.
And he pulled them over for an improper reason,
not based on speed.
And he let all those people go in 80,
and 90 just ignored 'em.
So you would argue that enforcement
of that rule was done rigidly or arbitrarily,
or capriciously, unfairly enforced.
I just want to get technology and configuration
into the conversation because we're configuring technology,
we're setting switches, limits, virtual gates,
and entry points and protections.
And that is setting a rule with the technology, right.
I hope that's all been thought provoking,
put things in context.
I created an infographic to sum it up for you.
So if we've got rules here,
and that's what we're talking about in this video.
Rules come from parents and family,
they come from ourselves, they come from society,
they come from organizations, they create internal rules.
And of course, that's what we're talking about here,
creating internal rules, policies and procedures.
And rules come from government,
what I call external rules, laws and regulations.
And we want our internal rules to comply with that.
So rules come from many places,
and we want to build good ones.
And policies and procedures, of course are rules.
They are internal rules of an organization.
These internal rules and organizations,
what they do has to comply with external rules,
laws and regulations.
I think that should be a given.
And that's our rule for the course, right?
We don't want to create internal rules.
We don't want our organization to do things
that violate the law.
Rules can be unwritten and cultural,
and rules can be written, right.
Policy, standards, procedures, and more.
Additional reading,
I've got an article called rules on my website.
There's the URL for it.
And of course we've got the course handout,
and that Policy and Procedure References article as always.
You made it to the end of another video.
So summing it up,
there are a lot of rules we deal with in life
and they come from different places.
Our parents, family, ourselves, societal norms.
And I guess we could debate
whether that's rules or guidance,
maybe a little bit of both.
All depends. Organizations, right.
Companies, businesses, entities, policies and procedures.
And that's got to fit within a framework of other rules.
Comes from governments.
And we're going to talk more about internal rules.
I'll see you in the next video coming right up.