First Friday – August 2026 – Rules for Rules' Sake

Rules are rarely the problem.

The problem arises when a rule is treated as the destination rather than the path. When the original purpose fades and what remains is the ritual of enforcement. When the person standing in front of you stops being a person and becomes a violation of policy.

Rules cannot be created in a vacuum. And they cannot be practiced blindly.

A Saturday Morning in Dallas

As I write this, it is a Saturday morning. I am flying home from Texas with a connection in Dallas. Our flight lands early (05:45 a.m.), and I have almost four hours until my next leg. I play the points game. I travel a lot. I have studied under a master collector of status and miles. So, I walk to the Centurion Lounge to grab breakfast and get some follow-up work done.

When I try to enter, I am denied.

I am told I cannot come in for another forty minutes. There is a rule: a guest must be within three hours of their flight to gain entry. I am forty minutes early. The lounge is empty. It is before 6:00 a.m. on a Saturday. Most business travelers are home with their families, where I should be. Capacity is not the issue. Fairness is not the issue. The only reason I am standing outside an empty room is that a rule says so.

I understand why the rule exists. Lounges can fill. People can camp. A three-hour window is a reasonable way to manage both. But how the rule is practiced is a different matter entirely. In that moment, the rule had become the point. The purpose, protecting the experience for those who need it, had disappeared. What remained was the ritual of denial.

Loyalty is tested in small moments like these. Not by the absence of rules, but by the absence of judgment.

The Gap Between Standard and Practice

Every organization needs standards. Without them, chaos. But standards are designed in conference rooms and policy documents, far from the empty lounge at 5:45 a.m. They are written for the average case, the expected pressure, theoretical abuse. They are not written for the quiet Saturday morning when the room is empty, and the traveler is early because the previous flight landed ahead of schedule.

The breakdown happens in the translation from design to practice. A rule that was meant to protect capacity becomes a rule that protects itself. The person enforcing it is often not empowered or not trained to ask the only question that matters: Does applying this rule right now serve the reason we created it?

When the answer is no, and the rule is still applied, we have crossed into rules for rules’ sake.

This is not unique to airport lounges. It shows in customer service scripts that force agents to recite policies while the real problem sits unaddressed. It shows up in compliance checklists that consume more energy than the risk they were meant to manage. It shows up in personal habits we keep long after the reason for them has vanished. The pattern is the same: the original intent evaporates, and the enforcement remains.

What Practice Requires

Good practice does not mean abandoning rules. It means refusing to let them become autonomous. It requires three things that cannot be written into a policy manual:

Context. The empty lounge at dawn is not the same as the crowded lounge at 5 p.m. on a weekday. Treating them identically is not consistency; it is indifference to reality.

Discretion. The person at the door must be trusted and trained to weigh the purpose of the rule against the moment in front of them. Without that authority, every interaction becomes a small act of bureaucracy.

Feedback. When rigid application produces absurd outcomes, the system should notice. Otherwise, the rule calcifies, and the organization slowly teaches its people that judgment is dangerous.

Rules created in a vacuum will always produce vacuum-like outcomes. The better path is to design rules that anticipate their own limits and then hire and empower people who understand the difference between protecting the purpose and protecting the rule.

A Quiet Test

I headed to the American Airlines club, and they accepted me right away. Breakfast was fine, the work was completed (including this article), but the small fracture remained: the sense that the system valued the letter more than the relationship it was supposed to serve.

Loyalty does not come from perfect policies. It comes from people who recognize when a policy has served its purpose and when judgment should take over.

This month, notice where in your own work or life a rule is being followed for its own sake. Ask whether the original purpose is still being served. And if it is not, consider what it would take to restore judgment to the practice.

Rules matter. How we practice them matters more.

Click below to schedule some time to connect directly!

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Best,

Robert Few

Managing Partner

The Connection Xchange (TCX)

201-838-0091

Robert.Few@TCX.email

www.theconnectionxchange.com

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