Scars

Earlier this year I read Rework by the 37Signals folks and the other day I remembered a chapter – ‘Don’t scar on the first cut’. The basic premise of this lesson is about policy…

‘The second something goes wrong, the natural tendency is to create a policy. “Someone’s wearing shorts!? We need a dress code!”. No, you don’t. You just need to tell John not to wear shorts. Policies are organisational scar tissue.”

The reason I thought of this was that Service Level Agreements had come up in a conversation and I thought to myself – something is up if there needs to be an SLA between teams that are co-located. Teams that work in the same space should be working together rather than putting in place some psuedo ruleset that pits one team against the other – that approach is a slippery slide to dysfunction.

When you find yourself talking about SLA’s step back and think about whether you really want to go down that line – try having a chat with your colleagues and take each issue one at a time. As Fried and Hansson say;

‘No one sets out to create a bureaucracy. They sneak up on companies slowly. They are created one policy – one scar – at a time’