Two styles of rules

This weekend we were at an event where lots of kids were at a park with a fountain. Jeff ended up hanging out with about 10 kids as they played around the fountain.

“Let’s skip stones,” one suggested, getting ready to launch a rock.

“Whoah, whoah,” Jeff said, “Look across the fountain. What do you see? Other people. If you’re successful in skipping the stone across the water, it can hit somebody.”

This forestalled it for a while, but later enough kids had found temptingly flat rocks that the interest in stone-skipping arose again. Jeff tried a new tactic:

“The way to skip stones safely is if nobody is on the other side. If everybody is on one side, then you can skip stones if you want to. Here, let’s all come to this side.” I left at that point, as the kids were rallying to one side of the fountain.

Afterwards I told him I thought it was a good flexible solution to a scenario where I would have just continued to enforce the “no skipping stones” rule.

“It ended up being harder to manage than I thought,” he said. “Once they’d thrown a rock, they wanted to go retrieve it from the other side, and they weren’t good about having a period where everybody throws and a separate period where everybody retrieves them. And the little kids just kept wandering around.”

…..

It’s a very small-scale illustration of some different styles of rulemaking.

The simplest rule to enforce is “no throwing rocks.” Maybe some of the older and less impulsive kids could have skipped stones safely.

A more flexible solution can get some different benefits — ideally, the kids get to skip stones while everyone stays safe. But it’s hard to orchestrate across 10 kids of different ages, some of whom Jeff had never met before. They weren’t his kids, and he didn’t have great recourse if it got out of hand.

The simplest system to run will often frustrate people for whom it’s a bad fit. It looks like hard-and-fast rules, applied without consideration for extenuating circumstances. (An earlier version at the same fountain was “Yes I know you have dry clothes to change into after you get wet in the fountain, but these other kids might not and they’ll all climb in the fountain if you do.” This was very frustrating to kids who would have been fine in the fountain.)

A more flexible system, rather than simply allowing or disallowing the thing, needs more rules and coordination. In the adult world it looks like: 

• Loading zones may only be used by commercial vehicles for up to 30 minutes
• Recreational fires shall be so managed that the flames do not exceed three feet above a fire pit and burning material is contained within the confines of the appliance/fire pit.
• Dogs allowed off-leash 6am – 9am except as posted

These rules are more complicated to enforce than “no parking,” “no campfires,” or “no dogs off-leash.” They’re less complicated to enforce than “you do you,” but the resulting rock-throwing / traffic jam / wildfire etc is its own problem.

There’s more room for people to be mad when they get a ticket on the 31st minute, or they don’t realize the rules were different from June 1-Aug 31, or someone’s dog was in heat. And people are understandably frustrated when the process for getting licensed as a commercial vehicle or whatever is understaffed or overly complicated.

I can see merit to both approaches. The best approach will depend on how much bandwidth the person / entity has to enforce more complex rules.