Principles in a Culture of Laws?

As I work through the last bits of the book I keep noticing my accidental omission of this very central theme. There is a fundamental difference between governance by laws and by principle. One of the reasons that I think the US is in a cultural crisis is because of the basic lack of guiding principles--at least consistent and shared principles. Instead, we have a law-driven society in which the attempt to delimit bad behavior and some predation is exercised on a virtually case by case basis. In this way we end up with ever more complex and obtusely specific rules--our entire tax code being a case and point, as are those laws governing corporate malfeasance.

Without shared values though, there is very little else to use as guides to behavior. This is a morass. Choose your arena of action and you will find a maze of ever-increasingly technical and specific rules, often with un-like issues wedded together as a result of their tortured and illogical genesis. The problem with this approach should be obvious. It is the reason that a mentally disabled person or an infant, even with good intentions, can't be relied upon to behave appropriately. The lack of an inferential capacity to use guiding principles to decide action leads to a total absence of a behavior compass. But trying to teach appropriateness on a case by case basis is a logical impossibility. The possible cases are always infinite, while the rules can only apply to the ones that have either taken place or which can be conceived.

So it goes in organizations. Teach a principle to ordinary, committed people, and they can make an infinite number of fine distinctions leading to the right choices. Teach rules to a brilliant person and he will naturally try to work back to a guiding principle--whether or not there is one. The rule-guided organization will be full of missteps taken in the assumption of principles that aren't there, and rules that inevitably contradict each other. The Principle-Powered organization will be full of subtle innovations in the application of core values, and an ever-rising level of behavior and performance.