The rule that wrote itself

A school banned phones in corridors. The rule was one sentence long and everyone understood it. Three years later the policy ran to eleven pages.

Nothing dramatic happened in between. A student needed a phone for a medical alert, so an exemption was written. A teacher used one to photograph a whiteboard, so a second exemption followed. A parent asked what happened to a confiscated phone, so a storage procedure was added. Each addition was reasonable on its own, and each was written by someone solving a real problem that week.

What nobody did was read the whole document afterwards. By the fourth year two clauses contradicted each other: one said devices were returned at the end of the day, another said at the end of the week. Staff applied whichever they remembered. Students noticed the inconsistency long before the office did, and concluded, not unreasonably, that the rule was arbitrary.

The interesting part is that the original one-sentence rule had worked. It worked because it was short enough to hold in mind, which meant that people could apply it consistently even in cases it did not anticipate. The eleven-page version was more complete and less usable. It answered more questions and settled fewer arguments.

Some organisations now set a page limit on their own policies and treat exceeding it as a signal that the rule needs rewriting rather than extending. The limit is arbitrary too. Its value is that it forces somebody, once a year, to read the whole thing and ask what it is actually for.