My heart goes out to Dustin Johnson.  He lost on a ruling.  Right call by the PGA? . . . yep.  Tragedy for the PGA tour? . . . yep.

I am not much of a rule follower, except when it comes to golf.  I don’t do anything egregious like steal or kill.  But was Dustin Johnson the only guy in the PGA Championship that grounded his club in a questionable bunker during the tournament?  I have a hard time believing that he was the only victim of the local ruling, but he was caught on tape during the last hole of the final round.  The other players weren’t under the same scrutiny and may have gotten away with one.

But for Dustim Johnson, he was under a microscope.  Rules are rules and violaters shall be punished . . . it is, after all, a gentleman’s game. 

Yet, I wonder.  What if one of those officials had helped Dustin out a bit, under the pressure of the situation.  Could the officials have prevented this by being proactive? 

In working with service organizations, I often see people that I call the “process police.”  These folks love rules and they love to catch people breaking the rules.  Some rules are just plain dumb and bureaucratic and others achieve their purpose.

I find it a better practice to create a cooperative attitude among workers and managers in the same system.  Instead of catching someone breaking a rule, managers should spend time in the work.  This approach is much better than new edicts and policies to force compliance.

In the case of the PGA, could they have prevented the bunker debacle?  I don’t know, but with a plethora of rules officials can’t they have a role of being helpful?  This protects the field AND the player (and possibly the spectator) when they take a more proactive role.  It also would save the embarrasment of learning that you just got knocked out of a playoff for a major championship. 

Regardless, for service organizations there is an opportunity to build their systems based on principles, rather than an avalanche of rules that are confusing and maddening to the worker.  Working together to achieve business improvement should be something all managers and workers do to make the system better.

Leave me a comment. . . share your opinion!  Click on comments below.

Make the new decade a profitable and rewarding one, start a new path here.  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about how to get started at tripp@newsystemsthinking.com.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbitt or LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

Tripp Babbitt is a columist (Quality Digest and IQPC), speaker, and consultant to private and public service industry.