Drowning In Policy

I was on safety duty at the sailing club on Sunday and found myself in a boat with a man whom, like many friends at the club, I know well enough to ask about his last race, the repairs he has done over the winter on his boat and his recent ski trip.  What I didn’t know, until we had 2 hours together in a 4 metre boat looking out for capsizes on a cold, windy February morning, was that he works for the local, government-funded Health and Safety laboratory.

 As we were chatting about the struggles he has at work to implement policies effectively he told me about a piece of research that fascinates him.  On arriving in my much warmer, drier office on Monday morning I looked up the research and was immediately struck by its relevance to so many of the work conversations I have had recently.  Hans Monderman was a Dutch Traffic Engineer whose radical approach to urban transportation planning won him several awards including a nomination for the prestigious World Technology Award for the Environment (see www.pps.org)

Monderman showed that only when city and village streets are stripped of their traffic controls do the roads become safer. Drivers begin to take their cues from looking at other road users instead of the signs.  Monderman’s concept is known as Shared Space and its results are the reverse of what many people would expect: without all the traffic controls the traffic moves more slowly and major accidents decline drastically.  Ben Hamilton-Baillie, an English urban designer, is quoted as saying ‘It’s a moving away from regulated, legislated traffic towards space which, by the way it’s designed and configured makes it clear what sort of behaviour is anticipated’.

AM (alpha male) in our house returns on a daily basis railing against the ever increasing raft of policy boxes he is required to tick before anything gets done in the engineering business with whom he is a director.  Zest have recently completed a piece of research in the Police Force which looks in some detail at the effect of policy and procedure on officers using their discretion in making decisions. The outcome of our work suggests that the more policies that are in place the less likely people are to apply common sense to situations which don’t exactly fit the policy.  And yet, it seems, that both public and private sector organisations are increasingly dedicating time to designing ever more complex policies so that every last possibility is covered.

An endless ream of policies and procedures in organisations which are designed to guide every behaviour in every situation is like an endless procession of road signs on a highway.  They take the eye of the driver away from the road and say to him ‘if you follow these and behave in this way, then nothing bad can happen to you’.  The message is wrong, organisations are taking responsibility away from individuals and suggesting to them that there is no need any longer, to think for themselves.

Where is the brave organisation willing to take Monderman’s approach to limit the policies to those which ‘design and configure the space’?  Where is the organisation who is willing to work hard to inspire responsibility, create awareness of self and others in all its staff and then to sit back and watch the amazing results?

Blog written by Elaine