§ 85
Context, Not Control
As an organization grows, rules and approvals tend to scale worse than shared understanding; Netflix's argument is that people given the reasons behind a goal make better local decisions than people given a procedure.
Keep in mind
Fix the missing context before you write a rule
What to do
When a team makes a call you would have made differently, ask what context they were missing before you write a rule, and fix the context first. Keep hard controls (approval gates, enforced policy) for decisions that are irreversible, unethical or a material risk, and record why each one exists so it can be removed when the reason goes away.
Why it happens
A rule encodes someone's judgment about the cases they could foresee, so it fails on the ones they could not, and every approval step sends a decision to a person with less detail than the one asking. As a company grows, each incident adds a rule and rules accumulate faster than anyone removes them, until people follow the procedure instead of thinking about the outcome. When managers spend their effort on the why (the goal, the constraints, what good looks like), the people closest to the work can decide quickly and still pull in the same direction. Netflix calls the result "highly aligned and loosely coupled".
When it stops applying
Guardrails: some failures (a leaked credential, a compliance breach, an irreversible deletion) cost too much to leave to judgment, and context does nothing for a newcomer who has not absorbed it yet.
Source
Netflix, Netflix Culture Memo (jobs.netflix.com, current version c. 2024), with the same principles set out in Reed Hastings & Erin Meyer, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention (Penguin Press, 2020) — "context not control", "highly aligned and loosely coupled", and keeping rules to a minimum to avoid the process creep that comes with growth.
Read the sourceCite this
Hammurabi, § 85, “Context, Not Control.” https://kanywst.github.io/hammurabi/laws/context-not-control/
BibTeX
@misc{hammurabi-context-not-control,
title = {Context, Not Control},
author = {{Hammurabi contributors}},
note = {Hammurabi, § 85},
url = {https://kanywst.github.io/hammurabi/laws/context-not-control/}
}Read in a column
- Working as a team Next in the column: Law of Triviality
Related laws
- 07Conway's LawSystems end up shaped like the communication paths of the teams that build them.
- 81Mechanisms, Not Good IntentionsAsking people to try harder after a failure changes little, because the failure happened to people who were already trying.
- 32Curse of KnowledgeOnce you know something, you can't easily imagine what it's like not to know it.
- 76Disagree and CommitWaiting for everyone to agree is often slower than committing and correcting course if the call turns out wrong.