On the two ways an institution abuses its own rules, and why following the process is not the same as being right.
Nobody installs a handrail before somebody falls.
That is the first thing to understand about an institution’s rules. Policies, procedures, declarations of interest: none of it was drafted by anyone with a taste for paperwork. Each clause is scar tissue. Behind it is an occasion when a decision went wrong, or was thought to have, and could not afterwards be shown to have gone right.
It is written by people who have been hurt, for people who have not yet been hurt, and it binds the very people who wrote it. A handrail does not know who installed it.
And here the trouble starts, because there are two ways to treat a handrail badly and they look nothing alike. You can step round it and tell yourself you are not the sort of person who falls. Or you can grip it so hard, and point at it so often, that you stop looking at the stairs, and when somebody does fall you can say with perfect truthfulness that the rail was in place and correctly fixed.
What the rule is actually doing
A procedure does not make a judgement wiser. It makes it checkable.
A decision made inside one head has only that person’s account of it, and no way to test it. Passed through a procedure, it acquires independent traces: a date, a second signature, a reason recorded at the time rather than reconstructed afterwards. None of that makes the decision right. All of it makes it possible to find out whether the story told later is true.
So the rule book is not principally a cage. It is the only exculpatory evidence a leader will ever have, prepared in advance, at no cost, by their predecessors. I have argued that before and hold to it.[1] This essay is about what I left out.
The abuse that gets written about
Circumvention is the one everybody recognises. The deserving case. The urgent case. The confidential case, handled quietly by a smaller number of people chosen by the person handling it. And the standing exception, understood to apply to staff and not the executive, though nobody has written it down and nobody would defend it aloud.
Malice appears nowhere on that list. Every exception is granted by somebody who believes the case warrants one. That belief is not the exculpation. It is the mechanism.
The pressure is worst where the work is already good. Shiraz Kabani, who generously made his doctoral study of sixteen leaders of London non-profits available to me, found this and named it.[2] Leaders absorb the goals of their organisation and convert them into personal values, so that protecting the institution is experienced as ethical conduct; for most of his participants, fulfilling the charitable objectives was the main ethical impulse and it overrode everything else. The mission that was to supply the moral seriousness supplies instead a permanent reason to be exempt from it.
The abuse that does not
In circumvention the rule is broken. In the second abuse it is kept, scrupulously, and made to do work it was never meant to do.
There is the alibi. Asked whether the outcome was right, the leader answers that the process was followed. Not a lie, which is what makes it effective. There is delay, where nothing is refused and everything is referred, and nothing happens and nobody decided that nothing should. There is attrition: resubmit in the correct format, to a different office, within a window. That is a fee levied on anyone who wants the institution to look at itself, and one side pays it. There is selective enforcement, where the rule is applied to some and not others, and its existence is what makes the selection deniable. There is laundering, where the conclusion comes first and a process is built to arrive at it. And there is proliferation: past a certain density everybody is in breach of something, enforcement turns selective by arithmetic, and you have rule by discretion in the clothes of rule by law.
None of these is detectable by checking whether procedures were followed, because in every case they were.
One of Kabani’s participants put it in a sentence I have not been able to shake. You can hide behind HR policy and legal policy, he said, but the real question is the moral one, and it asks much deeper questions, the kind that keep you up at night.[3]
The mistake underneath both
I said a procedure is your only complete answer. He said it is somewhere to hide. We are describing one filing cabinet, we are both right, and that is the point.
Circumvention treats the rule as a moral obstacle: my intention is good, so the rule stands in the way of the good. The second abuse treats it as a moral certificate: I complied, so the question of whether I was right is answered. Both mistake a device for testing claims for a device for settling questions.
A procedure cannot tell you what you ought to do. It tells you only whether what you say about what you did can be checked. Compliance is not virtue. Compliance is auditability.
A question follows, worth carrying into any meeting. When somebody invokes a procedure, is it offered as evidence, which could be checked and found wanting? Or as a conclusion, which ends the inquiry? Evidence invites a second question. Conclusions resent one. You can hear the difference in the room.
What would help
Three things, in order.
Publish the exceptions, not the policies. The policy tells you what is supposed to happen; the exceptions tell you what happens, who authorised it and on what ground. Most institutions keep no such register, and the reason they do not is the reason they should.
Put clocks on processes, with escalation rather than lapse as the default. Delay works because expiry favours the institution. Invert it and inaction acquires an author.
Protect whoever has to run the rule upward. Every arrangement here depends on one person applying a rule to somebody more powerful, and institutions almost never make that role safe.
Kabani’s own remedy is to educate leaders in the philosophy of ethics. The diagnosis is right; the remedy is weaker than it looks, for a reason his own data supplies. Every one of his participants could identify the ethical issue in the scenarios he set them.[4] They were not ethically blind. Knowledge was not the missing part. Instruction is not formation. If the training runs in the morning and a rule is quietly set aside in the afternoon, the afternoon is the curriculum, and the building will have learned it by Friday.
The rail
Nobody notices a handrail that is doing its job. That is the difficulty. Integrity’s successes are invisible and its failures arrive dressed as compliance.
A handrail cannot tell you which floor you are going to. The only reliable sign that it is real is the sight of the person who installed it holding on, on an ordinary day, when letting go would have cost them nothing. No policy compels that. It has to be seen. Which is why ʿAlī put conduct ahead of the tongue.[5]
[1]Daryoush Mohammad Poor, ‘The Chain Above the Chair’, The Twin Wisdoms, September 2026. The argument it builds on is in ‘Riding on the Shoulders of the Machine’, The Twin Wisdoms, 13 September 2026.
[2]Shiraz Kabani, ‘Linking Ethics and Leadership: A Qualitative Hermeneutic Phenomenological Study’ (DM diss., University of Phoenix, 2017), ch. 5, pp. 130 and 134. The dissertation is not openly hosted; my thanks to him for making it available to me, and for an argument that has improved this one.
[3]Ibid., ch. 4, Major Theme 3, p. 120 (participant SP117).
[4]Ibid., ch. 4, Major Theme 3, p. 121; the recommendation on ethics education is at ch. 5, pp. 142–43.
[5]al-Sharīf al-Raḍī, Nahj al-Balāghah: The Wisdom and Eloquence of ʿAlī, ed. and trans. Tahera Qutbuddin (Leiden: Brill, 2024), §3.65. Open access.
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