WHEN THE WORLD IS FASTER THAN ITS RULES
Anyone in touch with dynamic fields can find this phenomenon: Things are faster than the rules intending to control them. Hence, if the capacity to be enforced is very strong, old rules can stop the advancement. By the same token, if that capacity is weak, rules are simply ignored, and the world evolves following different paths.
The same fact can be observed in many different fields:
Three months ago, an article was titled “POR QUÉ ALBERT EINSTEIN NO PODRÍA SER PROFESOR EN ESPAÑA” (Why Albert Einstein could not be a professor in Spain) and, basically, the reason was in a bureaucratic model tailored for the “average” teacher. This average teacher, just after becoming a Bachelor, starts with the doctorate entering a career path that will finish with the retirement in the University. External experience is not required and, very often, is not welcome.
The age, the publications and the length of the doctoral dissertation (17 pages) could have made impossible for Einstein to teach in Spain. The war for talent means in some environments fighting it wherever it can be found.
If we go to specific and fast evolving fields, things can be worse:
Cybersecurity can be a good example. There is a clear shortage of professionals in the field and it is worsening. The slowness to accept an official curriculum means that, once the curriculum is accepted, is already out-of-date. Then, a diploma is not worth and, instead, certification agencies are taking its place, enforcing up-to-date knowledge for both, getting and keeping the certification.
Financial regulators? Companies are faster than regulators and a single practice can appear as a savings plan, as an insurance product or many other options. If we go to derivative markets, the speed introduces different parameters or practices like high-frequency trading hard to follow.
What about cryptocurrencies? They are sidestepping control by the Governments and, still worse, they can break one of the easiest ways for the States to get funds. Governments would like to break them and, in a few weeks, EU will have a new rule to “protect privacy” that could affect the blockchain process, key for the security of cryptocurrencies and…many Banks operations.
Aviation? The best-selling airplane in the Aviation history -Boeing 737- was designed in 1964 and it started to fly in 1968. The last versions of this plane don’t have some features that could be judged as basic modifications because the process is so long and expensive (more and more long and expensive) that Boeing prefers to keep attached to some features designed more than 50 years ago.
In any of these fields or many others that could be mentioned, the rules are not meeting its intended function, that is, to keep functionality and, in the fields where it is required, safety as a part of the functionality. Whatever the rule can be ignored or can be a heavy load to be dragged in the development, it does not work.
We can laugh at the old “1865 Locomotive Act” with delicious rules such as this: The most draconic restrictions and speed limits were imposed by the 1865 act (the «Red Flag Act»), which required all road locomotives, which included automobiles, to travel at a maximum of 4 mph (6.4 km/h) in the country and 2 mph (3.2 km/h) in the city, as well as requiring a man carrying a red flag to walk in front of road vehicles hauling multiple wagons (Wikipedia).
However, things were evolving in 1865 far slower than now. Non-functional rules like that could be easily identified and removed before becoming a serious problem. That does not happen anymore. We try to get more efficient organizations and more efficient technology, but the architecture of the rules should be re-engineered too.
Perhaps the next revolution is not technologic despite it can be fueled by technology. It could be in the Law: The governing rules -not the specific rules but the process to create, modify, change or cancel rules- should be modified. Rules valid for a world already gone are so useful as a weather forecast for the past week.
Useless diplomas, lost talent, uncontrolled or under-controlled new activities or product design where the adaptation to the rules are a major part of the development cost and time are pointing to a single fact: The rules governing the world are unable to keep the pace of the world itself.
Factor Humano 