ELIMINATING SILLY RULES IN A VALUE-DRIVEN ORGANIZATION

摘要

Many fire departments have "silly" rules. They were usually adopted after someone did something dumb. This made the chief mad, and he wrote out a new rule to prohibit everyone from doing it again. It doesn't matter that it was an isolated, unusual incident. But as long as we employ humans to be firefighters, we will occasionally have some dumb stuff happen. As a fire chief, I wish it wasn't so. As a realist, I know that even the best of intentions will sometimes result in something happening that can only be described as silly. Make no mistake about it. I strongly believe that we have great people in the fire service. Every fire department goes to great lengths to hire the best personnel. But we all have human frailties. There isn't one of us who can truthfully say that we have never looked back at one of our actions or behaviors and wondered why we thought it a good idea at the time to do what we did. Our 20/20 hindsight then showed us that our behavior in this one particular instance was dumb, stupid, or just plain silly.