Thinking about policies

Lately I have been talking to a variety of people on the topic of policy and while sitting on a plane heading to the West Coast, I thought I would capture some of my reflections on this topic.

Policy is one of those things that controls our lives in ways the average Joe does not give much thought. To make my point, have you read your employer's policies to see if they reflect your values? Policies dictate everything from what you can wear to work to what is required to take a day off from work. When done well, they represent common sense documented: the counter is they can be an obstacle to getting business done or a mission accomplished. During my professional career I have seen too often that way we develop policies has not changed much since the way they were created and managed in the Quattrocento (15th Century Age of Enlightenment).

Generally speaking, policies are written by well-meaning subject matter experts who want to do a good job, but have not been trained in the subtleties among a directive, policy, process, work instruction or operating procedure... The end products are typically compromises signed by leaders who believe their staff has met their intentions.

Once the ink is dry, we file and or store them digitally so they are discoverable. We might even include meta data and marvel at the wording that eloquently articulates a particular document’s intent. Everyone who participated then goes back to working on their next task and the knowledge why a specific artifact or policy was written goes away with them.

From that day forward I imagine there have been many beautiful sunrise and sunsets. Babies have been born and people have died. The circle of life goes on through changes of seasons. Think of all the first loves where time has stopped, if only for a moment, as the time when a policy is written until it is needed.

Let us say that you have been assigned a task that needs to be compliant to some directive, policy, process, work instruction or operating procedure, but you have questions because your needs or requirements are slightly different than what was written in the past. Here is the rub. It is unlikely you can find the authors, and even if you did, changing it in the time you need seems insurmountable. I speak from experience. Depending on your environment, you can ignore, change your scope, comply or take the charge to your task champion of the artifact (think Don Quixote.) The impacts for noncompliance can range from ignorance to violating law. You and others like you work to solve policy issues in basic isolation. On the other side, policy zealots would have you follow the words as if they were carved in stone and can never change.

Is there a better way? I think so…one that allows everyone to have their cake and eat it too. I call it a dynamic policy. What makes a policy dynamic? The policy must have in its meta data pedigree, lineage and the ability to add annotations that reflect specific changes needed to enable a task—and yes, this task needs to be linked. Policies must be under configuration control with the rich associated meta data. The value of this approach is transparency to everyone else using the artifact. The net effect is the merging of experience and intent. This is subtly different than what is typically done with waivers that, in practice, uniformly ignore the artifact and are only known to a small group. Dynamic policies allow all users through annotations to improve the artifact until a complete revision is necessary.

If you made the argument that this pattern could be applied to other data artifacts like entities, analysis or common libraries of code, I would be in complete agreement and I wonder why we do not use this approach more often.

In this age where we feel the need to diary everything and look for efficiencies, we need to be on the lookout for solutions that are not like a team of horses when we need a rocket.

I see desert and mountains out my window. I hope we land soon.