Many years ago a colleague told me “Rules are made to be broken”. I am pretty sure the rule makers don’t view it that way. This is an interesting philosophy and worth exploring a little.
Consequences
Rules are mostly enforced through consequences. If you break the traffic law and go through a red light without stopping you could receive a monetary penalty as a consequence. Worse, if you caused an accident your insurance costs could rise and if injury or death was caused there could be criminal charges and even jail time.
Alternately you might not be caught running the light and as a result suffer no consequences. In this case the potential for consequences and the impact of the consequences is high enough most do not break this rule.
Consequences do not always prevent rule breaking, even if quite severe. Drunk driving is a good example of this even though the consequences are very severe, people still do it.
Why break the rule? What about consequences?
My colleague’s comment about rules was very contextual to the work place. He viewed rule breaking as positive provided doing so let you achieve your business goal. This view could be stated as, the risk of consequence related to ignoring a road block to success was worth taking – provided the risk of consequence was low (he was probably carefully about stretching rules that could lead to dismissal).
In general the philosophy was meant to target stupid bureaucratic rules and could be interpreted as a way of thumbing your noise at the business establishment (this is the way my colleague viewed it).
Personally the direct approach of breaking the rules does not resonate, but succeeding by getting around them in clever and subtle ways really works for me. In a sense this is more overcoming the rules than breaking them.
Lip Service
One of my most successful techniques is to agree to stupid rules, make it appear like I am following them while mostly I am focusing on my goal as directly as possible while keeping the rule guardians happy with irrelevant actions meant mainly to keep them satisfied. It never amazes me how surprised they are when I succeed. I can hear them thinking, how did you achieve that with all the roadblocks we put in place?