I recently read an interesting article on the New Yorker's website, here*, about how rules, accepted convention and how doing something outside convention can yield results. It is an article that spawned a number of thoughts or, more accurately, realisations of occasions in my career where the messages in the article are really pertinent. The first example was triggered by one of several anecdotal references in the article, that of Doug Lenat and the Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron tournament which I will briefly summarise for your convenience and to better clarify my point though I'd still recommend you to read the whole of the New Yorker article.
In 1981, Doug Lenat was a computer scientist at Stanford University and decided to enter the Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron tournament. Run in San Mateo, this was a war game governed by a comprehensive rulebook which gave participants a trillion credits to design a fleet of warships to do battle with other contestants' fleets. Battles occurred over the course of a weekend in a large hall, described by Lenat thus, "Imagine this enormous auditorium area with tables, and at each table people are paired off. The winners go on and advance. The losers get eliminated, and the field gets smaller and smaller, and the audience gets larger and larger."
Lenat had developed an artificial intelligence program called Eurisko into which he fed the tournament rulebook. Lenat gave Eurisko no advice or help, not being a war gamer himself he had none to give and so, unencumbered by human interference, Eurisko set to work. Running for about ten hours a night on one hundred computers at Xerox Parc, it took about a month for Eurisko to find an answer (this was 1981 remember!).
Compared to the normal human designed fleet that featured an array of ships of varying sizes balancing attack, defence and mobility Eurisko's decision was radical. "The program came up with a strategy of spending the trillion on an astronomical number of small ships like P.T. boats, with powerful weapons but absolutely no defense and no mobility," Lenat said. "They just sat there. Basically, if they were hit once they would sink. And what happened is that the enemy would take its shots, and every one of those shots would sink our ships. But it didn't matter, because we had so many." Lenat, or rather Eurisko won the tournament easily that year.
Next year the rules were changed to outlaw static gun platforms by introducing an enforced 'agility' measure that counted toward success. Provided with the new rulebook, Eurisko started work again. "What Eurisko did was say that if any of our ships got damaged it would sink itself?and that would raise fleet agility back up again," Lenat said. Eurisko won again.
In this competition, Eurisko was an underdog. All the other gamers had extensive knowledge of military history and strategy. They were skilled at gaming. Eurisko knew nothing but the rules and it had no common sense and made no interpretation of the rules based on its own experiences. It was this lack of understanding of the conventions of the game and even life itself that was Eurisko's advantage. "Eurisko was exposing the fact that any finite set of rules is going to be a very incomplete approximation of reality," Lenat explained. "What the other entrants were doing was filling in the holes in the rules with real-world, realistic answers. But Eurisko didn't have that kind of preconception, partly because it didn't know enough about the world." So it found solutions that were, as Lenat freely admits, "socially horrifying": send a thousand defenseless and immobile ships into battle; sink your own ships the moment they get damaged.
For a summary, that was quite long, wasn't it? Hope you're still with me! The essence of the anecdote for me is the interplay between experience, interpretation of rules and the forming of conventions. When we are given a set of rules that define a process, we fill in the gaps, we interpret those rules based on our current knowledge and experience and that then defines how we proceed. If this interpretation of the rules is followed repeatedly it becomes a convention. Once something's a convention it becomes accepted as being the rules and that's where the problem occurs because people lose sight of the original rules, and most importantly, the true meaning of them.
This is a problem that I've seen in many large corporate IT departments with large, old policies. Over time, the policies have been interpreted and the interpretation has become convention. The convention has become so often practiced that it is now assumed to be the policy. When you attempt to implement something new, a technology or an approach (bearing in mind the speed at which IT moves, new is a fairly common concept) it creates all sorts of problems because it doesn't meet policy.
That's not true though because it's not being judged against policy. It's being judged against the accepted policy which is actually the convention that has been built around an interpretation of the policy that was made long before this technology or approach existed. What should happen but doesn't is the rules that define the original policy need to be picked up and looked through by someone unencumbered with the experience of the convention and with knowledge of the new approach or technology who can determine if the policy is truly broken or not.
We need to follow the rules, not the convention.
* http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/11/090511fa_fact_gladwell for those reading this in print.