Rules vs. Principles

“Rules are not necessarily sacred, principles are.”
– Franklin D. Roosevelt

A couple of months ago, the columnist James Surowiecki, the New Yorker’s financial analyst, discussed the steps taken by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson in the face of the ongoing U.S. financial crisis. Surowiecki described the “major overhaul” of the American regulatory system demanded by Paulson as one of philosophy as well as practicality, one in which the existing “rules-based” system would be replaced by a new model, a “principles-based” approach. He identified the differences between the systems thus:

“In a rules-based system, lawmakers and regulators try to prescribe in great detail exactly what companies must and must not do to meet their obligations to shareholders and clients. In principles-based systems, which are more common in the U.K. and elsewhere in Europe, regulators worry less about dotted “i”s and crossed “t”s, and instead evaluate companies’ behavior according to broad principles; the U.K.’s Financial Services Authority has eleven such principles, which are often deliberately vague (“A firm must observe proper standards of market conduct”). This approach gives companies more leeway in dealing with investors and customers—not every company needs to follow the same rules on, say, financial reporting—but it also gives regulators more leeway in judging whether a company is really acting in the best interests of shareholders and consumers.”

Surowiecki draws the analogy between these two systems as “something like the difference between football and soccer. Football, like most American sports, is heavily rule-bound. There’s an elaborate rulebook that sharply limits what players can and can’t do (down to where they have to stand on the field), and its dictates are followed with great care. Soccer is a more principles-based game. There are fewer rules, and the referee is given far more authority than officials in most American sports to interpret them and to shape game play and outcomes. For instance, a soccer referee keeps the game time, and at game’s end has the discretion to add as many or as few minutes of extra time as he deems necessary. There’s also less obsession with precision—players making a free kick or throw-in don’t have to pinpoint exactly where it should be taken from. As long as it’s in the general vicinity of the right spot, it’s O.K.”

George Lakoff describes similar disparate ways of viewing the world as “frameworks” in his book, Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. In politics, Lakoff identifies two distinct cognitive framing devices at play, that of the “strict father model” and the “nurturant parent model” parent. You can guess which approach belongs to which party. That diametric framework also applies to the modal shift Surowiecki was discussing, as well as to many other more mundane experiences of everyday life.

I was reminded of frameworks and rules vs. principles a week ago when I was pulled over while commuting to work on my bicycle. Unable to give a definitive reason why I “broke the law” and rolled through an empty intersection marked with a stop sign, I was reminded again of the difference between the two philosophies. Cyclists largely operate by principles, but those principles are sometimes not in accordance with the rules that both drivers and cyclists are directed to observe. For example, as a long-standing cyclist I “know” that stopping at every stop sign is the correct and law-abiding way of doing things, but I also know that when I come to a complete stop next to a car, I've sacrificed the only two defensive tools I have: speed and agility. When that car moves into my lane, or turns in front of me, I have no recourse. Without movement, cyclists are pedestrians standing in the street. To a cyclist, rules are important, but not the only concern.

The difficulty inherent in frameworks is that they’re often tackling the same end goals but using completely different methodologies and language to achieve them. I realized quickly that the police officer and I had largely the same overall goals in mind (I, trying to avoid injury, he not wanting me or anyone else hurt on his watch), but we had very different ways of achieving those goals. It was immediately apparent that we weren’t going to convince each other that either approach was better, or even successfully communicate the reasons for our respective approaches. We were left with the implementation of rules in the face of principles.

As researchers and designers we are able to discover and negotiate frameworks in many other areas besides finance, politics, and transportation.

When a client comes to frog and asks that we imagine the future of the mobile phone, we first break that device down to its core principles: What is the latent user need that it is serving? What are the expectations surrounding that particular device, or in communication devices in general? What typologies have been formalized in regards to mobile communication devices? These questions and more are common to the way we tackle most of our design problems. Establishing the principles around which we design is of the utmost importance because they allow for flexibility in expression while still narrowing the field. When a phone is reduced to a latent need for communication between two individuals, it becomes potentially so many other things. The question then goes from a more rules-based “what is the design language of a mobile phone” to a principles-based “why does it need to have the design language of a phone, or be a phone at all?”

The iPhone is emblematic of this cognitive shift. If the design of the iPhone had been approached using a rules-based system, it would have most likely ended up looking and behaving a lot like other devices on the market. Rules around button size and placement, screen size, and hierarchy would define and lock down the design before conceptual work could even begin. In essence, the iPhone is successful precisely because it eschews rules and instead follows broader and more aspirational principles.

After the underlying principles have been defined, rules become increasingly helpful to our process. They allow for parameters to be set around principles, technologies to be addressed and utilized, manufacturing to take place efficiently, and for platforms and systems to be adopted without a hitch.

At frog, often the most difficult part of a project is the end of our research phase, when we’ve looked at and developed a set of principles to guide us for the remainder of our work. We respect that, for our clients, this moment can represent something of a leap of faith. Principles aren’t something that can be drop-tested, analyzed via BOM-costs, or even accurately portrayed with quantitative research. In many ways they defy rules.

By necessity of scale, and as a cost of doing business, many of the companies we work with are rules-based to varying degrees. Learning the vernacular and working style of each client and then being able to translate the value of our framework into theirs is a large part of every project, and one that we’re always trying to improve.

Working to leverage and communicate to both users and stakeholders the reasons for our design choices, we often find ourselves tailoring or straddling different conceptual frameworks, acting as translators between groups that can't or won't talk directly to one another. As conceptual designers, we spend most of our time in a principles-based world, tagging cultural information, categorizing it into groups, and generating ideas from those groups that have deep meaning to the individuals for whom we're designing. At times we can be librarians, curators, archeologists, crafts-people, or visionaries. In our principles-based system, context becomes all important. Principles offer a flexibility that rules alone cannot.

As frog's Executive Creative Director, Nick de la Mare leads frog’s cross-disciplinary teams in the pursuit of strategic design solutions across product, service and experience. His work focuses on the convergence of digital and physical media to create branded experiences for Nike, Chase, Disney, Johnson & Johnson, among others. His projects have been recognized by the IDSA, AIGA and others, and published widely.