Order out of Chaos

At a particular primary school in New Zealand, they examined relaxing rules around recess. Climbing trees is ok, skateboarding is ok, bullrush is ok, even playing around the scrapheap around the back of the school is ok. The children, lost in their play, now that they were allowed to play to their heart's content, have ended up having no time for bullying, graffiti, or vandalism. 

As a result, the number of teachers on duty can also be decreased and, according to the principal, “The school is in a state of chaos, but no-one gets hurt!”. Even though “dangerous” play is allowed, the number of injuries is in decline and, in the classroom, motivation and concentration levels are on the up. A trial done as part of a university study showed how effective this was and, at this school, the relaxation of the rules continued...

Now, as someone from the older generation, I feel like “It's got to the point where they can't even climb trees?”. But nowadays, parents' conceptions of danger have changed and once something's “dangerous”, it not easy to re-instate it. It takes real courage for a principal with charge over however many hundreds of students to make a decision like this.

If you want to manage a large group of people, especially if they’re young kids, the most effective way is to start by restricting their range of activities and reduce their degree of freedom. That’s reasonable…

           If we do that, it's easy to keep an eye on them and they'll have fewer accidents

And, we'll put in all sorts of rules and keep the people that break them under control

And everyone else will be behaving according to the rules, and then we can be “at peace”

         

But people whose activities are restricted and are constrained by rules are the complete opposite of “at peace”. Their hearts, far from being peaceful, are filled with a smouldering frustration and who knows when it's going to erupt. When things are like that, there's no way they can concentrate and their motivation becomes trapped.

And of course we all want to be free to do the things we want to do.

“But, if we let people run wild, isn't it going to be a complete debacle?”

For a manager, such a situation would mean a complete failure and it is terrifying.

Recently, even in the workplace, instances of managing employee behaviour have been increasing, utilising a whole host of brand new technologies. A delivery company in America has been radically increasing its profits by closely monitoring its drivers' behaviour. For these drivers, even tiny delays are to be kept under control, even the time it takes to remove their seat belt, and so some of them drive without wearing them.

With truck drivers, they're outdoors and they're friends with their regulars on their delivery rounds and at one point it was a popular industry. But now that it's become micro-managed down to the second, a lot of them are plagued with injuries, illness...and even divorce. I feel like saying “If that's the kind of trust you have in your employees, how about you quit being a boss?” Isn't “being able to feel like you are trusted” part of “job satisfaction”?

If we're afraid of chaos, it's because we have no faith in the order of the universe. Perhaps that principal is entrusting the safety of those children to something greater. Otherwise, where's the guarantee that, if they fall out of a tree, they're not going to break any bones, that they're not going to catch tetanus from a rusty nail, and that when one of them gets tackled in a game of bullrush, it’s all going to be ok?,

At first glance, the school grounds are hugely chaotic, but in reality, a mysterious order is being kept. From this comes true peace of mind.

[You can find the original post 「混沌の中の秩序」in Japanese here.]