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Rules exist for a reason.
As soon as we’re born, we’re thrown into a world of structure and regularity.
Limits and borders. Patterns and schedules. Customs, conventions and regulations, ours is a reality of law and order.
Or so we are taught to believe.
Agree with them or not, our lives revolve around knowing and sticking to rules, and those who don’t are often looked down on, frowned upon and shunned.
Some of us find comfort in them: they reaffirm our positions in the world and provide certainty and safety.
We know what to expect, and what’s expected from us.
They govern our social reality and all the organised and structured associations we’re embedded in, large or small.
They tighten and straighten what is loose and crooked: they discipline, bring together, add density and consistency. They give us meaning, purpose and direction.
Just like any organism, organisations struggle to meet a fundamental evolutive principle: keeping themselves in existence at any cost. They develop what German philosopher Schopenhauer called a ‘will to live’.
As organisations grow, so do their policies and processes, compounding and expanding, often layered on top of the previous ones, becoming more and more bureaucratic.
Author Emily St John Mandel muses, "bureaucracy is an organism, and the prime goal of every organism is self-protection. Bureaucracy exists to protect itself."
In an attempt to survive at all cost, the red tape slows us down, makes us rigid and fixed, binding us until we can no longer move, talk, think. While everything around us changes, our organisation becomes unfit and maladapted.
The paradox is clear: the obsession with self-protection and survival chokes life and dooms it – while removing all joy in the process.
Freeing ourselves (and those around us) from the rule book allows us the time and space to breathe again, explore and experiment.
There’s no life where there’s no space for questioning, challenging and bending the rules.
In a way, rules are made to be broken.
Our highlights
💡 Ideas
Nour Sidawi
A thought provoking read on how a big organisation can navigate complex change with the help of people from other disciplines like ecology, anthropology, linguistics, and human geography.
🔮 Trends
Nexer Digital
Nexer Digital just published 10 videos of talks at Camp Digital to their website. Topics include the language of dying and death, earth experience design, and what a digital future could mean for the NHS.
🌐Web
Will Coldwell, Wired
Smart email and text replies using AI have been in our mailboxes for the past few years. As digital services expand to capture even more of our lives through data, Will Coldwell looks at what happens when AI captures our emotions too.
💻 Tech
Lauren Gillies-Walker and Naeem Ramzan, The Conversation
Building a case for co-design, authors Lauren and Naeem share their study in which they engaged autistic people to hear their thoughts on wearable technology.
✍ Language
Kate Lindsay, The Atlantic
It’s bad news for Millennials: we’re getting phased out of social media and parodied by Gen Z for our language and mannerisms. You may want to think twice before posting that GIF on Slack or saying ‘I can’t even’.
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