If you’ve been on the internet anytime in the past week, you’ve likely encountered the story of United Airlines dragging a passenger off of a flight in Chicago.  There have been plenty of articles written about the incident.  Most journalists tell the story of why airlines overbook flights, or how the UAL public relations team and CEO have mishandled the aftermath.

With that said, almost everybody ignores a key player in the story. Few are laying blame on the employees that decided the police needed to be called and the passenger forcibly removed. People are focusing entirely on the United Airlines rulebook, rather than the the gate agents that “followed the rules.”

As a society, we are inherently lazy and inclined to just follow the rules. It’s probably for good reason. Nobody gets fired for following the rules. And if you think about your position with a short-term perspective, it’s significantly safer to be a rule follower.  Hell, it also takes a lot less energy.  It takes much less brainpower to mindlessly do what you are told than to think critically about everything you do.

In Jeff Bezos’s annual letter to Amazon shareholders, which coincidentally was published soon after the UAL incident, he had a similar thought.  Jeff wrote,

“Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right. Gulp. It’s not that rare to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, “Well, we followed the process.” A more experienced leader will use it as an opportunity to investigate and improve the process. The process is not the thing. It’s always worth asking, do we own the process or does the process own us?“

Processes and rules are a natural addition as an organization grows.  Both are necessary for an organization to scale efficiently.  At some point organizations need more structure.  But, like everything else at an evolving organization, rules and processes are created as a response to change.  In many respects, these processes are nothing more than a best practice becoming “the” practice.

As Jeff noted, we have an insatiable draw to follow and then blame the rules over questioning their purpose.  We tend to view rules as laws rather than guidelines.  Although we’ve all been guilty of this at some point or another, it’s that mindset that stifles organizational growth.  We all know that feeling when a rule feels wrong.  It’s a weird place to be.  But it’s tough to act on that emotion because following the rule brings a sense of security.  In the short term it protects your job.  But in the long term, it keeps you and the organization from evolving and growing.

Things might have ended differently had a UAL employee dared to stop thinking like a computer and thought about breaking a rule. Maybe they would have offered a higher than normally allowed compensation to somebody for giving up their seat. Maybe they would have kept the plane grounded until another person agreed to go. Maybe it wouldn’t have ended how it did. But all of that would have started with one person choosing to challenge the rules before they blindly chose to follow them.

Next time you’re faced with a similar decision, I challenge you to think before you follow. It will feel scary, but it will take you much further.