The Death of Process
To write great policies, arm those in the future who will kill your darlings
Writing policy and process guidelines is hard. You work for weeks collecting everyone’s feedback, tweaking the wording to avoid all kinds of anti-patterns, and then still you have to watch people use it as a blunt instrument to bludgeon colleagues with anyway. There is no bulletproof policy that can’t be misused. There’s no trick to designing process so that people consistently honor the spirit and intention rather than the literal interpretation of the document in front of them. I spent months working with some of the deadliest and most effective policy wonks in DC — both on the Hill and in the White House — and the one thing I learned is that policy has a natural lifecycle. When it’s brand new it moves awkwardly through the world, when it settles in it hopefully thrives for a time.
But even if it does, no matter how successful it might be, eventually its routine wears its effectiveness down, its body starts to fail and it can no longer perform its role.
That’s because good policy fixes problems and when a problem is removed from the system, the system incentives change. Think about this way: why do startups start young, idealistic and innovative only to eventually grow more and more corporate and litigious in nature? It’s because early stage companies tend to hire people who…