Law – Innovation – Regulation: The Desperate Try to Reconcile Them
by Zoltán Dankó
Future-Proof Organization Practitioner -- Human leadership fuels high performance. If you have open mind, I help add open culture to leverage open-source - Change is risk: doing the same leads nowhere. Let's move on!
Management ranks in companies and board members talk about innovation a lot; politicians are even louder. They are not lazy to establish innovation teams or departments tasked with the impossible. Colleagues in these teams should figure out how to change the company into an innovation engine to be proud of.
The noble colleagues do their best to accomplish what they set out to do.
Confronting the organization has consequences. The smart ones realize that they don’t have a chance to succeed and leave. The rest of the colleagues will soon be converted into a PR organization. Loud communication around, but what results did they achieve?
There are onlookers who suggest that the entire company should participate in the innovation. These individuals did not face the corporate culture or had no clue about the workings of the human mind either.
The real problem lies somewhere else.
A society can’t work without laws. Since there is no known way to align interests and intents in our human culture, and individuals should not decide based on their interests and intents, humans need laws to be imposed on everyone in society. Otherwise, there is a high chance we will kill each other soon.
A company is usually organized on the same principles, except an ever-increasing profit should also be produced. The more people work in the organization, the more rules must be created to regulate all the imaginable processes and happenings.
If we take the time to sum up, the number of laws (and other mandatory state rules) and the corporate regulations, we end up at a number above ten thousand. Well, it is said that you are a good citizen if you don’t breach the rules but follow them. At best, we can remember a few dozen of them. (I suppose here that every individual can interpret them correctly and accurately since legal professionals write these rules.) If I can’t remember, I will act best as I guess it right. If I made a wrong decision, I would be punished.
It is a heretic question to ask whether these rules and laws are consistent with each other. Aren’t there any contradictions between rulings? Since there has not been an attempt to scrutinize them properly, there is a chance they are inconsistent, not clearly formulated, and do not lack contradictions. Lawyers help us maneuver on these chaotic seas. They are our sailors.
So, let us imagine an eager individual who has found an issue to fix it with an innovative idea. This is the start line for an inconvenient Canossa walk for our poor minds. People come across to inform or threaten our innovator why acting like that is not right. They immediately tell how many rules will be breached if this activity continues. Some innovative minds stop here and conclude that it is not worth the effort. Others spend more time figuring out which way to fix the issue according to the rules. Many gees beat pigs.
In conclusion, there are two ways to innovate:
First, you breach the rules and don’t care; you hope for the best that you succeed faster than you will be killed. It is a matter of time.
Second, you make an inventory of all rules – state, corporate, and societal rules together –and you analyze them with the help of AI (If you hate and are afraid of AI, then make a small calculation for how much time it would require for a few thousand lawyers to accomplish the same task.). Trash all of them that are outdated or fix the contradictions. However, be aware that there are many supporters of the legacy who will fight against any change. They are not enemies of progress or evil, they simply follow the autopilot workings of their minds. Or they are inevitably interested (money and power) in preserving the status quo because it is good for them.
It is good news; we have the technology to accomplish this. We can use the first option until the cleaning up is finished.
Finally, at this point, it is fallible to discuss privacy and ethical topics since they cannot be free from the malleable intervention of the rules around them. We can discuss theories and ideals of how it should be. Conversely, many things could be relieved again if superfluous rules could be trashed at once. Imagine society and the company in the new light: only rules that support us and our living exist. We need to wait for a while until the dawn of AI when malevolent individuals cannot corrupt the system according to their interests and desire for power. You decide you want to live in the old way because you think you know the rules, or let us try a change for the better.
