A lot of companies have someone whose job is to make the company a nicer place to work.
They’ll sort out the perks package, and make sure people have got gym memberships, and decent healthcare, and generous parental leave. They’ll work on the company culture, the values, the mission.
These are all good things.
I’ve spent twenty-five years doing something similar, but for the systems people work inside.
Because here’s the thing. You can have incredible benefits and an inspiring culture, but if the work itself is frustrating, confusing or constantly getting in people’s way, none of it really matters.
It might be the way people talk to each other, or the way decisions get made, or the way work flows through a company. Those things are all systems. Those things are designed too.
You wind up at a place where good people are delivering in spite of the organisation's systems, rather than because of them, and that... comes at a cost.
Just not one you're measuring yet.
And that’s the bit I made the House Rules Framework to help with.
You Don't Have A People Problem.
The details change. The shape of the problem usually doesn't. But stuff like this doesn't have to be normal.
Your systems are rewarding the wrong behaviour.
Most people respond sensibly to the systems they're in. If the behaviour looks wrong, the incentives often are too.
Might show up as: defensive estimates, hidden risks, and a team that's stopped telling you the truth.
Your organisation is losing touch with reality.
Projects rarely fail all at once. More often, the picture inside the organisation slowly drifts away from what's actually happening.
Might show up as: milestones that pass but don't quite land, and a growing sense that the plan stopped reflecting reality a while ago.
You built the way you work for an imaginary employee.
Real people have different strengths, constraints and ways of working. Good systems make room for that instead of pretending everyone is the same.
Might show up as: decent satisfaction scores alongside quietly persistent underperformance.
People are leaving for reasons you can't see.
Good people rarely burn out overnight. More often, they slowly stop believing they can do their best work here.
Might show up as: your best people going quiet, burning out, or heading for the door.
These aren't four problems, they're symptoms — and House Rules is how I find the system underneath them.
The House Rules Framework
House Rules for short.
Every organisation runs on systems. Every one of them was designed – usually for good reasons, often years ago, sometimes by people long gone.
House Rules is how I read that design. It scores the character of a place across thirteen Traits, works out what it can actually do with them, and names the Conditions coming down the line – the trouble you can feel, and the trouble still hiding behind it.
You bring the symptom. House Rules finds the cause.
When the cracks begin to show, workarounds begin to surface as folklore – the unwritten rules, the 'that's just how it works here.' A team that's fraying, or a dependency that's started to scare you, or a formerly good place that's quietly getting harder to work in. None of those are the problem. They're symptoms of a system doing exactly what it was accidentally built to do.
See It Work
I pointed House Rules at InGen – yes, the Jurassic Park company – and scored it exactly as it appears on screen, before things start going wrong. The verdict? Magnificent at doing, dangerously thin on the people holding it up, no slack for the day things go sideways. House Rules predicted:
Hidden Burnout: a skeleton crew running a park that should need an army. The output looks magnificent, so nobody's measuring what it costs to produce – until the reserves are gone.
Hero Dependency: the whole operation rests on four irreplaceable people. Lose any one and a capability leaves with them. No bench, no backup, no redundancy.
Resilience Deficit: tuned to run exactly as designed, with nothing held in reserve. Flawless right up to the first thing it didn't plan for, then everything downstream goes at once.
Introduce a rampaging Tyrannosaur into the mix, and well... we all know what happens.
Writing
Want to know how I think? Here are my latest articles.
More?
Click through to read about some of the things I've made, or to learn how we might work together.