There are several opinions why big ideas have failed. One is, undisputed common to most big failures, the unjustified belief that people will always obey the rules.
If you do set up a process which success is defined on several participants to follow rules defined by that process. You just designed a broken process from scratch. Especially if participants do believe that they can gain an advantage over others in this process who adhere the rules.
Actually there are 4 ways to deal with this:
- Redesign of the process - e.g. provide a benefit not upfront but after all of the participants have played fair in a process (no upfront discount but a yearly backend rebate)
- Create loopholes to bypass the guidelines - which produces a lot of frustration and more willingness to use this loopholes (remember - unjustified belief about rules)
- Stick to the rules by all means - this does produce a continuous flow of discussion an image of "out of common sense" and frustration about the process. People know that others will not obey the rules and if they are forced to do, they will hate you for that.
- Dump the process and define a new one - unfortunately process are defined by people who mostly left the company already and all the other stick with the process because they don't know better ... see also the 5 Monkeys Experimentsee https://intersol.ca/news/organizational-culture-and-the-5-monkeys-experiment/
