Do as you are told - which is, not just to do as you are told

I have recently heard the word compliance being used in two different ways; there's the organisational necessity of following legal requirements (which here I call ‘Compliance’) and then there's an organisational culture whereby people expect to be told precisely what to do and not to do, and not to have to use their initiative (which here I call ‘compliance’).

Any successful organisation needs to be Compliant. Unless we’re making a principled stand against laws we are seeking to overturn, our part of the social contract means following even laws we don't like, in return for all the benefts of living in a society. But compliance is a totally different thing, and here I want to argue against compliance in schools – for teachers, students and support staff alike.

There are multiple reasons for this.

Firstly, students are quick to sense, adapt to and even mirror a culture – and one of just do as you are told can be very ugly. There are few things more conservative and repressive than the peer pressure of teenagers determined to enforce their unwritten codes; it’s not what we want for healthy, happy students. I would far rather have a measured, thoughtful tendency to disagree and even disobey, when the occasion calls for it.

 Secondly, as this (in)famous cartoon shows, there is something paradoxical about teaching students to think in a culture of compliance. It’s hardly the route to risk-taking, stretching oneself when one is at one’s limits, or originality. It leads to passive, cookie-cutter students, and is the opposite to establishing determined, independent, powerful adults. It flies in the face of what many have thought are the fundamental purposes of Education

Few useful rules admit of no exceptions

Thirdly, for compliance to be remotely tenable, you need to believe that you can state universal rules with which to comply, and which admit no exceptions. That goes against my experience of people; and I have learnt from bitter experience that enforcing any apparently-sensible rule sometimes ends up backfiring. This silly mug makes the point; exceptions abound.

A compliance-culture does not attract the best people

Fourthly, compliance leads to mediocrity. It suggests that individual interpretation and judgement is unwelcome, and it is hard to think of a more certain route to stagnation and alienation. A culture of compliance will not lead to attraction and retention of great staff; a culture of freedom and autonomy will. This is an idea which seems to be touted as a new recruitment strategy by the likes of Google and Facebook but which has been well-known for a long time. In 1916 John Dewey wrote the best minds are not especially likely to be drawn where there is danger that they may have to submit to conditions which no self-respecting intelligence likes to put up with; and where their time and energy are likely to be so occupied with details of external conformity that they have no opportunity for free and full play of their own vigor.

Fifthly (thanks to Gemma Dawson for this), it seems that a compliance orientation for teachers pulls them away from actually looking at learning, and focuses them on for example, finishing a particular worksheet. Even though teachers with a compliance orientation still encourage students, they can unintentionally discourage divergent thinking and close down exploration . Hardly an encouraging recipe for creative thinking!

All that said, I am not an anarchist! I do not believe the old joke that the only thing worse than an inefficient bureaucracy is an efficient bureaucracy. In service of a good goal, efficiency is an excellent thing; and we need guidance, and we need structures. Without them, organisations would be in constant chaos, disputing, negotiating, and reinventing each day the basic rules and procedures by which the staff and board operate.

This may seem like a contradiction; how can I argue against compliance and make this claim for organisational alignment and structure?

Organizational theorist Richard Scott explains that there is no tension: Because obedience is owed not to a person—whether a traditional chief or a charismatic leader—but to a set of impersonal principles, subordinates in bureaucratic systems have firmer grounds for independent action, guided by their interpretation of the principles. They also have a clear basis for questioning the direction of superiors, whose actions are presumably constrained by the same impersonal framework of rules. In other words, if we state our principles, and have common sense of purpose and direction, then we can get the best of collective action without the worst effects of a compliance culture. It all comes back to this point - that we need to keep re-visiting shared purpose and mission, and not focus on narrow adherence to task. If we get the former correct, the latter will follow.

So we can resist compliance and still have a thriving effective organisation. Again, this is old wisdom, and Justice Benjamin Cardazo in 1920 argues this even for the law: Common law is at bottom the philosophy of pragmatism. It’s truth is relative, not absolute. That has to be right; compliance is a route to the illusory goal of ultimate clarity and certainty, and it's not where we are headed. We aspire to be a school of children, not a school of rules.


References
Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and Education. NY: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. p67

Scott, R., (2006) Organizations and Organizing: Rational, Natural and Open System Perspectives: Rational, Natural and Open Systems. Perspective Paperbacks.