Source: Radio New Zealand
Natasha Hamilton-Hart’s new book: Stupid Rules: Reducing Red Tape and Making Organisations More Effective and Accountable Supplied
Too many rules, too little judgement – why one Kiwi professor says the country is strangling itself with red tape.
Professor Natasha Hamilton-Hart has a simple rule for stupid rules: get rid of them.
She says the country’s love for red tape is making life harder and society less effective.
So, she’s written a book about it.
It’s aptly called Stupid Rules: Reducing Red Tape and Making Organisations More Effective and Accountable.
She tells The Detail that modern workplaces are trapped in a culture of compliance that replaces judgement with bureaucracy.
“We have too many stupid rules, which are the rules that regulate when we really should delegate authority, and if we actually ceded a little discretion to authority, we would paradoxically have more freedom, and we would get more of what we want,” she says.
In this episode, Hamilton-Hart, who is a professor in management and international business at the University of Auckland, gives examples of both personal and professional experiences.
The personal: volunteering with a conservation group, helping teams to get rid of pest plants in urban areas.
“The first time I did this, headquarters sent us this health and safety form which had a matrix on it, and you were supposed to list every conceivable adverse event, and then you were supposed to attach a probability of it happening and how serious it would be if it did happen.
“And when you start thinking about it, well, actually, people could injure themselves pretty badly if you take them gardening, they might even have a heart attack.
“The point was, if you took it literally, and go, ‘we are not taking a defibrillator out with us on our weeding expedition, so if someone had a heart attack, actually they would probably die,’ we wouldn’t have been able to do it at all.
“So obviously I was supposed to lie when I filled out this paperwork,” she says. “But that’s kinda ridiculous, that has gone overboard.”
Changing a hyphen
Her professional experience included a hyphen in a name on a university website, which was wrong.
“I thought, ‘no problem,’ I got my office manager to send the web people a note and say, ‘can you take the hyphen out?’.
“This had to get escalated to the head of administration in my faculty, because I was told that the rule book said the hyphen had to be in there.
“I’m pretty sure the rule book doesn’t have naming rights over study centres.”
She says rule books can become shorter and more effective if companies, sectors, governments, and organisations cede authority to people in a hierarchy or empower them to decide what is appropriate.
She points to General Motors, which once had a clunky employee dress code that grew to 10 pages long.
But when Mary Barra became vice president of global human resources in 2009, she replaced the whole thing with two words: “dress appropriately”.
Hamilton-Hart says this sort of change achieves two things: it makes common sense and requires authority.
Employees gain more discretion, but managers will have to step in when someone gets the dress code wrong.
And this is what the book is about.
“What inspired me, if inspired is the right word, was actually coming back to New Zealand after many, many years away, and mostly working in Southeast Asia, where, whatever else they suffer from, tends not to be stupid rules. And coming to New Zealand and thinking, why can’t we get things done?
“Why can’t we build buildings that don’t leak? Why can’t we have finance companies that don’t go bankrupt? Why is it so hard to actually deliver the stuff that people want delivered?
“There is no disagreement – we want better hospitals, we want better schools, we want to raise literacy rates, but we don’t seem to be able to do it.
“And I know there will never be just one reason, but I sort of got curious about what stops organisations delivering on their purpose.”
She says she discovered a “flight from authority” in recent decades, which has stripped organisations of command capacity and resulted in workplaces where employees tick boxes rather than exercise initiative.
She says the answer isn’t to abandon rules altogether – but to rethink how organisations govern themselves.
That means trusting expertise, strengthening leadership authority, and holding people responsible for outcomes rather than compliance.
In other words, fewer rules – but clearer responsibility.
She says if nothing changes, the country could be left with more bureaucracy, less effectiveness, and a system where everyone follows the rules, but nothing works quite as it should.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
