Rules or Values

We all follow many rules in our life. Have you ever stopped before a red light and wonder why stop light should be red and say "well I am going to write a letter to the minister of transportation and request to change the stop light to white". Most likely this never happened to you! or?

However as a society, we gradually questioned our traditional "rules", examples of that could be methods of ruling, roles of men and women within the societies, children rights, animals rights etc. Most of these rules are revolutionized if we compare it to decades ago. Still a long way to go but that is not the point of this article. What makes some of our rules more exposed to change while we accept other rules, like the red light?

These were extreme examples and fairly easy to understand, but when it comes to daily life in both personal life and work, this might not be that easy anymore. If you set a rule for your child to sleep at 8 o’clock at night, they might question it soon or late why 8PM why not 9PM or 7 PM? If you are at work and define a way of working in your project suddenly a new group of people come in and question all the methods, how do you want to justify it? How flexible should you be to changes? If you are in an active workplace, I am sure you have faced these questions already.

Rules are meant to serve us or a purpose. We create rules to make things simpler and automated, so we do not need to go through all reasoning every single time that we face the same issue. Back to the red light, we associate the color red with danger in our unconscious mind and it is consistent with all our educations and even in nature (at least I hope that was the reasoning for color coding behind the first invention of traffic light!). Rules are good! Rules are there to keep us safe, but it can be changed when it does not serve us anymore.

Rules are meant to serve us, values are meant to control us

Rules are very dependent on environmental parameters and circumstances. Values are unbreakable! Well sort of; values are connected to higher level values in a value chain. They are more general as we go higher. But let’s not get into this!

Back to the kids bedtime, it changes over time as they grow the bedtime will be delayed anyhow, and how about the Fridays and Saturdays? 8PM is a short term rule to make things simpler but a good value could be “ to get enough sleep”.

If you are in an enterprise you might need to consider:

• Rules are for structuring, preventing chaos, safety and convenience. Rules should/will change over time.
• Revisit your rules, more often if the environmental parameters defining the rules are changing
• More Advanced systems need higher level of value argumentation. Different problems or sections in your enterprise might need a different balance of rules/values.

 Now you might wonder how on earth the top picture is related to this article. If the value is simplicity of expression, a circle should stay in the polar coordinate, even if we like the Cartesian coordinate better!

Note: My articles are only my personal opinion, shared for encouraging constructive discussions.