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Bedford and the Normalization of Deviance

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Re: Bedford and the Normalization of Deviance

#21
post #4

> There are several factors which tend to sprout normalization of deviance: > First and foremost is the attitude that rules are stupid and/or inefficient. This is a great reason why to try your hardest to avoid implementing stupid rules. When some rules are stupid and become ignored, other rules lose their power.

I think it's also why there's real value in investing time to explain the rules and why they're important

and understanding that even over just 2 layers of bureaucracy its really easy to lose an understanding of the why behind a process

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Part of that is that its quicker to just rely on the institutional power

"I'm your boss, do it this way because I tell you to"

"My boss told me it needs to be this way, and I'm your boss, and the bs flows downstream, so do it this way"

uses fewer institutional resources, but that comes at the cost of no one actually knowing why things are being done the way they're being done,

and no one understands the costs of deviance from the processes being implimented

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and in lots of instances, the benefits to deviance tend to be higher than 'we get to take off a little faster'

lots of times what we measure people on tends to be in conflict with the processes we want people to follow, so we even incentivize people inventing little shortcuts around the processes we want people to follow

Re: Bedford and the Normalization of Deviance

#22
post #7

One of the most important talks I've ever seen is Richard Cook's "Resilience In Complex Adaptive Systems"[1], in which he explains the fundamental abstract mechanism that causes the normalization of deviance. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGLYEDpNu60

Related article by Richard Cook: http://web.mit.edu/2.75/resources/random/How%20Complex%20Sys...

Re: Bedford and the Normalization of Deviance

#23
post #4

> There are several factors which tend to sprout normalization of deviance: > First and foremost is the attitude that rules are stupid and/or inefficient. This is a great reason why to try your hardest to avoid implementing stupid rules. When some rules are stupid and become ignored, other rules lose their power.

Rules are organizational code. Be prepared to fix them when you find out they don’t work as well as you thought.
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