WHY RULES ARE MADE TO BE BROKEN…HOW TO BREAK THEM RESPONBILY

Many times we hear people saying rules are meant to be broken. Some of us have taken this statement wrongly thinking that the statement justifies breaking of rules unreasonably or it justifies people committing crime.

The aim of this post is to bring understanding of circumstances under which rules are broken responsibly.

Invention/Innovation: 

There are times when you need to come up with something original, something very unique, and you find that some rules just guide you into doing something that already exists. You think you have a good idea, you think you want to bring unique goods or services, you think you want to perform exceptionally and you see that following certain rules will not make it possible for you to achieve what you want? In such situations you may need to break those rules, because they are really meant to be broken in such situations.   

Some organizations encourage innovation/invention and that they know rules may be obstacle to innovation, their organization structures and policies are designed in such a way that  they  don’t demand employees to follow rules in certain situations. 

A good example is Facebook, on its Careers page it is written:

"We don’t have rules. We have values"

Ethics: 

Based on your background, you must have learnt what is right and what is wrong- these rules of what are right and what is wrong is termed morals. But there are times when you must choose what is good or bad according to specific environment you are in. In observing ethics you may ignore some ‘rules’ being what you have learnt in the past to be right, instead do what seems to wrong.

For example, even if you know that your company’s products are more expensive than your rival’s, you won’t tell your customers to go the rival just because according to some ‘rules’ it is good to help others.

Opportunity cost: 

There are times when you are faced with choices of following or not following a certain rule. In such cases you may weigh the outcome of both following and not following the rule. When the outcome of not following the rule has less negative consequences than following the rule, it is that time when the rule is to be broken.

In some cases, some people may choose to break a rule while they are full aware that not following such rule results into more harm than following such it. Such people do it responsibly if they feel they can accept and live with the outcomes of their decisions.

Unreasonable rules: 

In some cases, some rules are just unreasonable to follow either because such rules were not correctly constructed, the rules are no longer valid because of new development or new circumstances or just because following the rules or not following the rules don’t harm any other.

Exceptions: 

In specific situations or to certain people some rules don’t apply. Therefore it may be unwise to follow rules in a situation where they are not supposed to be followed. Example of exceptions could be geographical location, culture, level of income, level of knowledge of a person you are dealing with, relationship between persons, type of organization, social status of a person etc.

Feel free to write your comment about just after this post replying to; what is your reason for breaking rules? What is your understanding of breaking rules responsibly?. 

Remember there is no rule here, just comment.