Policies are made for the lowest common denominator

Have you ever struggled and chaffed against stupid rules at work?

I know I have.

Why do I need to fill out this form?

Why does that group need to approve this?

Wait, we need to wait how long to release?

The list goes on and on, and so does the frustration. For years I was confused why so many places I worked had senseless policies that got in the way of me doing my job.

I remember this one episode from Malcolm in the Middle where Malcolm gets in trouble at work for not flattening boxes in the “designated box flattening area” and getting way more work done because he did the job the most efficient way he saw.

There is no point in having a “box flattening area.” Just get rid of it!
So why do we have these rules?
The people I’ve worked with genuinely want to make things better. I’m lucky, and it’s been a while since I’ve seen rules created to allow someone to create a tiny fiefdom inside a company.
So, where do the terrible rules come from?
Sticking with the “box flattening area,” I suspect that rule came about because of an accident. Something terrible happened, and afterward, people looked into what happened and came up with the idea of the “box flattening area” to prevent that kind of problem from happening again.
Does creating the “box flattening area” address the root cause of the issue? I have no clue it’s a contrived example in a TV show. It feels like a solution that quickly addresses the symptom rather than digging deeper to find the root cause.
It’s uncomfortable for folks to go through something like The Five Whys even if they are familiar with the technique, as it’s all too easy to sound accusatory when asking “why.”
There is also a challenge to removing rules once they are established. “That’s the way we’ve always done it” becomes an answer far faster than we realize.
Also, for most people questioning rules is an uncomfortable process.
We often ask ourselves, “Do I really think you know better than all the people who created this rule?”
What I’ve come to realize is that it is the wrong question. Instead, we should ask, “Do I have more information than those who created this rule?”
We almost always have more information, and we should not ignore that. The rule might actually have been the best available solution at the time, but now there are different solutions.
The next time you come across a policy that seems dumb, remember that it was made by well-intentioned people trying to solve a specific problem as quickly as possible with less information than you currently have.
It still might be an uphill battle to remove the policy, but approaching it from that angle will also make it seem like less of an attack on those who created it.