I have trouble understanding what’s going on in people’s heads when they choose to follow policy when that’s visibly going to lead to horrific consequences that no one wants. Who would punish them for failing to comply with the policy in such cases? Or do people think of “violating policy” as somehow bad in itself, irrespective of consequences?
Of course, those are only a small minority of relevant cases. Often distrust of individual discretion is explicitly on the mind of those setting policies. So, rather than just publishing a policy, they may choose to give someone the job of enforcing it, and evaluate that person by policy compliance levels (whether or not complying made sense in any particular case); or they may try to make the policy self-enforcing (e.g., put things behind a locked door and tightly control who has the key).
And usually the consequences look nowhere close to horrific. “Inconvenient” is probably the right word, most of the time. Although very policy-driven organizations seem to have a way of building miserable experiences out of parts any one of which might be best described as inconvenient.
I’m not sure I agree who’s good and who’s bad in the gate attendant scenario. Surely getting angry at the gate attendant is unlikely to accomplish anything, but if (for now; maybe not much longer, unfortunately) organizations need humans to carry out their policies, the humans don’t have to do that. They can violate the policy and hope they don’t get fired; or they can just quit. The passenger can tell them that. If they’re unable to listen to and consider the argument that they don’t have to participate in enforcing the policy, I guess at that point they’re pretty much NPCs.
I don’t know whether we know anything about how to teach this, other than just telling (and showing, if the opportunity arises), or about what works and what doesn’t, but I think this is also what I’d consider the most important goal for education to pursue. I definitely intend to tell my kids, as strongly as possible, “You always can and should ignore the rules to do the right thing, no matter what situation you’re in, no matter what anyone tells you. You have to know what the right thing is, and that can be very hard, and good rules will help you figure out what the right thing is much better than you could on your own; but ultimately, it’s up to you. There is nothing that can force you to do something you know is wrong.”
I am saying you do not literally have to be a cog in the machine. You have other options. The other options may sometimes be very unappealing; I don’t mean to sugarcoat them.
Organizations have choices of how they relate to line employees. They can try to explain why things are done a certain way, or not. They can punish line employees for “violating policy” irrespective of why they acted that way or the consequences for the org, or not.
Organizations can change these choices (at the margin), and organizations can rise and fall because of these choices. This is, of course, very slow, and from an individual’s perspective maybe rarely relevant, but it is real.
I am not saying it’s reasonable for line employees to be making detailed evaluations of the total impact of particular policies. I’m saying that sometimes, line employees can see a policy-caused disaster brewing right in front of their faces. And they can prevent it by violating policy. And they should! It’s good to do that! Don’t throw the squirrels in the shredder!
I don’t think my view is affluent, specifically, but it does come from a place where one has at least some slack, and works better in that case. As do most other things, IMO.
(I think what you say is probably an important part of how we end up with the dynamics we do at the line employee level. That wasn’t what I was trying to talk about, and I don’t think it changes my conclusions, but maybe I’m wrong; do you think it does?)