When organizations grow, this tends to get supplanted by lengthy books that attempt to capture the right behaviors in detailed rules that capture every scenario. A better approach would be to hold onto the culture of “doing the right thing.”

When presented with a clear set of rules, people tend to change their behavior just enough to circumvent rather than break the rule. Often this is not completely intentional. They don’t want to break the rule so they read it thoroughly and figure out how they can achieve BOTH their desired outcome AND obey the rule. We often refer to this as obeying the letter of the rule but not the spirit.

When expectations are principle based rather than rule based, people tend to act in such a way as to respect the principle, then formulate their own behavioral guidelines that fit the moment much better than any black-and-white rules written years earlier. We might even think of these principles as capturing the condensed “spirit of the rules,” since that seems to be what we really want followed anyway.

In a sense, this method treats staff as intelligent people who, when given guidance and ownership over the outcome, can act in a principled way that also agilely adapts to new situations as they arise.