Most people would say that someone has the right to be a vegetarian, since it’s a personal choice. But most people would also say that their choice doesn’t give them the right to enter a hot dog eating contest and demand that the rules be changed to accommodate them.

That’s an extreme case, but there are other cases that aren’t so clear-cut. When can an organization be expected to accommodate individual beliefs and practices, and when does the individual have to either comply or go home? What would you say in the following situations?

1. The Muslim weightlifter

Kulsoom Abdullah dresses for competitions the same way she always dresses in public – with her entire body covered, except for her face and hands. But she won’t be able to do that if she wants to participate in competitions governed by the International Weightlifting Federation.

The rules say that the elbows and knees must not be covered, so that judges can verify that the joints are locked and that the competitor is not wearing anything that gives them an advantage. But Abdullah was happy to hear that the IWF is willing to discuss the issue at their next meeting, and possibly allow some kind of exemption.

On the one hand, it’s probably possible to figure out a way to cover her elbows and knees while also allowing the judges to do their job. On the other hand, why should the burden be on the IWF and the judges?

What if the competition was during Ramadan (when Muslims fast between sunrise and sunset), so she wanted to compete at 5 AM instead of the scheduled time of 5 PM? What if someone’s religion requires them to wear thick clothing that makes it impossible to verify that their joints are locked? What if someone’s religion forbids them from touching metal?

2. The Marine at airport security

In the movie Taking Chance, Kevin Bacon plays a Marine Corps officer. As he approaches airport security in his service uniform, the TSA agent asks him to remove his medal-clad coat so it can go through the x-ray. Kevin refuses and asks to be taken to a private room and wanded down.

The TSA agent is annoyed and asks not to be told how to do his job. As the growing line becomes increasingly impatient, the agent again asks that the coat be removed. Kevin says he will not desecrate his uniform by running it through the x-ray, and demands to be wanded down in a private room. The agent allows this, but he isn’t happy about it.

This situation is similar to the previous one. He’s perfectly capable of removing his jacket and making it easy for everyone, but doing so conflicts with his beliefs. The biggest difference is that airports are already set up to allow private screenings – it’s not like the TSA has to debate whether they should allow this.

But suppose that for whatever reason, granting this request was difficult (maybe the person who usually does these things wasn’t on duty at the time). Does Kevin have a reasonable right to refuse to take off his coat, or does he give up that right by choosing to fly?

While we’re at it, what if he believed that planes should just drive on the roads instead of flying? What if he wanted to salute with his left hand?

3. The handicapped golfer

Casey Martin has a birth defect known as Klippel Trenaunay Weber syndrome, which requires him to constantly wear two rubber compression stockings and makes it painful and dangerous to walk long distances. He wanted to use a golf cart in the PGA Tour, but the rules say that everyone walks, as the fatigue from walking is part of the game.

His lawyers submitted videos showing the severity of Martin’s condition, in which his leg turned gray as the blood tried to push its way up. They argued that walking would risk fracturing his leg, which would lead to amputation, and that using a cart would not give him an advantage over his competitors who had to walk.

Martin’s request to use a cart under the Americans with Disabilities Act was initially denied by the PGA Tour in 1997. In 2001 the case went to the Supreme Court, who ruled 7-2 in favor of Martin.

Since this situation involves a disability rather than a personal choice, it might be easy to say that of course he can have a cart. But does that give him an unfair advantage over people who have to walk several miles in the hot sun?

If we’re going to say that walking isn’t part of the game, then anyone should be able to use a cart. If we’re going to say that giving him a slight advantage is an acceptable compromise to allow someone with a disability to play, then what constitutes a disability?

What about a sprained ankle? What about narcolepsy? What if someone who can’t swim for medical reasons wants to enter a triathlon?

Photo by duncan

Are rules just arbitrary hoops to jump through, meant only to demonstrate power and mete out punishment? Or are they necessary to prevent everything from slipping into anarchy and chaos?

Here’s one more post on this line of thought from Darkworker Supervisors Want Doctor’s Notes.

When rules are necessary

I’m really not “anti-rule” per se. I think that sometimes it’s essential to have very strict rules with no exceptions. A great example is anything about security.

Back when they were putting the post-9/11 security measures in place, a lot of objects that used to be perfectly fine on a plane were no longer allowed. There was even a pilot–not a passenger, but a pilot–who was stopped from bringing a fairly harmless item on board.

I don’t remember what the forbidden item was, but let’s say nail clippers. The pilot thought it was crazy that nail clippers were considered too dangerous, when there was an axe in the cockpit. Let’s just use some common sense. Shouldn’t they have let the pilot on board with the nail clippers?

Actually, no, they shouldn’t. In this particular case, the rule seemed pointless. But the problem is that once you start allowing people to bend the rules according to their judgment, you’re opening the floodgates for security breaches.

I worked at a company where we had to pick a password that contained a mix of uppercase letters, lowercase letters, and numbers. It couldn’t be based on a dictionary word, it couldn’t be one we’d used before, and we had to change it very frequently. They wanted our passwords to be almost impossible to crack.

But do you know what the biggest cause of compromised passwords was? People were simply revealing their passwords when a stranger called them and asked nicely.

“Hey, this is Bob from tech support. We’re working on the network and trying to fix a problem that’s making everything run slower than normal – maybe you’ve noticed that. Can we take a look at your account real quick? What’s your password?”

And people were giving their passwords away like this. Yeah, it sounds like an obvious scam when you think about it, but many people would fall for it. It’s called the rule of authority: if someone seems like an authority, people won’t question them. That link points to Dean Rieck’s post about a TV reporter who staged a bank scam as an experiment, fooling 10 out of 10 customers, just by looking authoritative.

So if you’re a security guard, and a pilot wants to bring his nail clippers on board, you have to stop them. What if they’re not really the pilot? Maybe they just stole an ID card and managed to get someplace they’re not supposed to be. Maybe they’re going to leave the nail clippers for their friend to pick up, while they go for the axe. You need to do your job by serving as an additional safeguard. Besides, if you make one exception, it’s easier to make the next one. You only have to be wrong once for disaster to strike.

Photo by zzellers

When rules get in the way

On the other hand, many rules aren’t so necessary. In Darkworker Supervisors Want Doctor’s Notes, I talked about a supervisor who made up a pointless rule to enforce. They wanted an employee with ongoing health problems to provide two doctor’s notes per visit: one confirming that the appointment was made, and one confirming that the appointment was attended.

This wasn’t the company’s rule, but something the supervisor made up because they thought it was a good idea. It wasn’t. Even human resources didn’t understand the need.

Was it a doable request? Sure. Getting doctor’s notes isn’t hard. The problem is that it’s creating a needless hoop to jump through, while conveying a lack of trust.

But wait–without this rule, wouldn’t people abuse the system? Yes, some people might. Some people just want to coast through their job, doing the bare minimum not to get fired. Maybe they’d get a kick out of scheduling doctor’s appointments and not showing up, just to get out of work.

But why not address the problem directly? Why not fire the useless employees, instead of trying to control everyone with excessive rules?

I used to work at a company that had a clearly stated internet policy. Brief personal use of the internet was allowed, but you should make it quick and then get back to work. Fine. That’s how it should be, right?

Then one day they decided that some people were spending too much time on the internet, so they were thinking about disabling internet access for everyone. I thought that was a terrible idea.

First, it would have repercussions. People who used to spend five minutes a day scanning the news would instead be spending four hours a day bitching about how they had no internet access.

Second, it wouldn’t fix the problem. People who used to waste time on the internet would simply find a different way to waste time.

Instead of imposing this rule on everyone, why not tackle the problem directly? If someone’s spending a lot of time on the internet, why is that? If they don’t have enough work to do, then find out where they can help out. If they just don’t want to work, then fire them. This is not complicated.

Just today I spoke to someone who joined a company as VP a few months ago. He said one of the first things he did was get rid of the obvious underperforming employees. OK, that’s a good thing, but why were they there in the first place?

I worked at a company where I wasn’t allowed to remap my keyboard to the Dvorak layout (a more efficient alternative to QWERTY that greatly reduces hand strain). I had to actually get a doctor’s note saying it was medically necessary before they let me do it. So I eventually got around it, but it was a pointless hoop to jump through. Why would they make up a rule just to slow me down and give me carpal tunnel syndrome?

I worked at a company where someone got in trouble for installing Firefox, which was not the company’s “official browser.” Why did they care what browser he used? But anyway, if it was that important to them, they could have just asked him to uninstall it. Instead, they removed his adminstrative rights. That kept him from installing Firefox, but it also kept him from installing the applications his job specifically required. He couldn’t even set his clock to the right time.

And then there’s the whole ROWE vs. TOWE thing.

Of course, everyone needs to put up with some rules. But some rules are helpful, and some aren’t. Companies need to stop valuing compliance with pointless rules over performance. They also need to stop paying people who do nothing but slow their employees down. Companies make money by getting stuff done, not by following rules.

When rules appear to be pointless, but aren’t

I worked at a company where people weren’t allowed to install anything on their computer without getting it cleared by network support first. Some people thought this rule wasn’t important, and they decided to go ahead and install whatever they wanted.

But the rule was there for a good reason. A lot of the programs people were installing were introducing viruses into the network. And then network support had to waste a lot of time cleaning up this problem that shouldn’t have been there in the first place, if people had just followed the rules.

So what did the company do? They sent out periodic emails to everyone. These emails reminded people about the rule, but more importantly, explained why the rule was necessary.

Instead of treating people like children and saying “You’re going to do this because I said so,” it came off more like “This causes a lot of extra work for us, so we’re counting on you to help us out by simply asking before you install anything.”

If you need to start a rule, (1) make sure it does more good than harm, and (2) explain to people why it’s necessary, and get them on board with it. I see a lot of people in power failing at both of these.

Yesterday, I posted about the Automatic Blog Post Rehasher, which is a tool I wrote that spits out random combinations of words vaguely resembling a blog post. It was a joke about the widely held opinion that there seems to be relatively little value in the massive blogosphere.

But behind this joke is a grave concern, one that I didn’t touch on before, but that many people have in mind.

Barbara Swafford at Blogging Without A Blog, recent winner of a Blogscar Award, had this to say:

It makes me wonder, can we post anything, and our loyal readers will continue to come back? Will we continue to get Stumbled and Dugg? If that’s the case, all social networks could lose their reputation of having the best of the best, blogs will be tagged as “words taking up (cyber)space,” and someone else may be plagiarizing Obama’s “words, just words” statement to describe blogs.

How sad it would be if blogs took on a “myspace” mentality and we start posting tons of personal photos, include music playlists, write about what we had for dinner, vent our frustrations over a fight with our significant other, and stop sharing valuable information.

Let me generalize this to go beyond just blogging. What would the world be like if people didn’t know the rules for providing value?

If you believed that rehashed tripe would get Stumbled and Dugg, would you stop trying to write original posts?

If you believed that you got paid less than an unproductive coworker, would you stop trying to be productive?

If you believed that girls always go for the jerks, would you stop trying to be nice to them?

In Schindler’s List, Helen Hirsch spoke of the tragic randomness her people lived with every day:

We were on the roof on Monday, young Lisiek and I, and we saw the Herr Kommandant come out of the house on the patio right there below us, and he drew his gun and shot a woman who was passing by…she was no faster or slower or fatter or thinner than anyone else and I couldn’t guess what had she done. The more you see of the Herr Kommandant the more you see there are no set rules you can live by, you cannot say to yourself, “If I follow these rules, I will be safe.”

And that, to me, is the biggest problem with a world that seems arbitrary. There are no set rules you can live by. You cannot say to yourself, “If I provide this value, people will appreciate it.”

Then again, there may be rules for providing value. But I sure don’t know them all.

One rule I do know is that you always give people what they want.

If someone says they want a hamburger, you might think they mean that they’d be fine with just a hamburger, but they really want a steak. So you go to all the effort to bring them the thickest, juiciest steak ever, and they’re disappointed. Then you talk about all the major culinary awards your steak has won, and try to convince them that they really do want a steak. But it doesn’t matter how much value you’re providing, because all they wanted was a hamburger.

Unfortunately, most of the people we want to win over aren’t telling us what they want. No one has ever told me that they’d Digg and Stumble me if I repackaged some hackneyed tips into an uninspired post titled “12 Sexy Ways To Achieve Your Goals.” I know it works for some people, but would it work for me? I don’t know. And I don’t think I can bring myself to try, even if that means I’m holding myself back.

So Barbara, I don’t know how to answer your question. I don’t know if we can just post anything and be rewarded with subscribers and social media popularity. I hope it’s not really true, but more than that, I just hope that the rules are consistent.

Does anyone know what the rules are?