Barry Schwartz tells the story of the father who went to buy a cold drink for his son at a ball-game and innocently brought back one that had a fraction of alcohol in it. The security guard spotted the kid with an illegal drink, hauled them out of their seats, called an ambulance, sent them under guard to hospital. Tests showed no alcohol in the kid's system, but the welfare worker took him into care and sent him to a foster-home for three days. A judge concurrently ordered that the father should move out of home into a motel for further reports and after three weeks allowed him to be reunited with his family.
This insanity, says Schwartz, was due to people applying rules that gave no room for their commonsense to be applied. When questioned as to their part in this mini-tragedy they all said "We had to follow the rules. "
A slavish reliance on control via Rules is just one way in which the Command and Control model drives natural wisdom out of any systems that has to respond to the huge variation in human behaviours and needs.
Schwartz is worth listening to at length. at
Barry Schwartz on our Loss of Wisdom
