The New Rule After One Mistake

Something goes wrong, and the first instinct in a lot of organizations is to write a rule so it never happens again. It feels responsible. It looks like leadership. And most of the time, it’s the wrong move.

The Dash 8

Here’s the one I watched happen as a young CO.

FAR 52.217-8, the “Dash 8,” lets the government extend services up to six months at the contract’s rates. It’s a safety valve for when a follow-on contract runs late. An agency lost a protest because it used the Dash 8 without ever evaluating it in the original competition. Real error. But the fix was cheap: if you didn’t evaluate it and you need it, write a sole source justification. You’re almost always using the Dash 8 as a bridge to a late follow-on anyway, and bridges get justified all the time. The process already existed.

Instead, the Air Force made evaluating the Dash 8 mandatory on every evaluation. The trouble is you can’t really price it. You don’t know which period you’ll be in when you need it, so you don’t know what rates you’ll be extending. Every evaluation got more expensive and more complicated, for something most contracts never use. And the force learned to treat a useful tool as a risk.

The Army hit the same problem and went the other way. Its supplement says to evaluate the Dash 8 when you’re reasonably likely to use it, and if you didn’t and later need it, prepare a justification before you exercise it.¹ Same protest risk, two answers. One added work to every buy in the service. The other used a process that already existed.

One buy, one missed step, one protest loss that was never going to be the end of the world. The response was a policy the whole enterprise has paid for every day since.

Now picture the federal government writing a new rule after every protest it lost. We’d be handcuffed. There’d be no flexibility left in this profession, and flexibility is the whole reason contracting officers exist. Anyone can protest anything. A loss tells you where your left and right lanes are. It’s not a signal to pave over the whole road.

The good news is that this way of doing business is dying. The FAR overhaul is the government admitting it. The executive order behind it says the FAR should hold only what’s required by statute or essential to sound procurement, and it even told the FAR Council to consider putting an expiration date on the non-statutory rules that survive. Decades of “never again” rules are getting stripped out, because together they made the job harder without making it better.

Why we keep adding

Turns out adding is just how people’s brains work. Researchers at the University of Virginia ran eight experiments asking people to improve things: designs, essays, recipes, travel itineraries, even a Lego structure. People overwhelmingly reached for something to add, even when taking something away was the better answer. Subtraction only showed up when people were reminded it was an option or had time to think it through.² The authors point out that this default may be part of why organizations end up buried in red tape.

Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao at Stanford call the organizational version “addition sickness.”³ Organizations reward it. The leader who launches a new program gets noticed. The leader who quietly kills a bad one usually doesn’t. So rules pile up, every one of them added by someone who meant well.

When you’re hearing nothing

This one’s for the hard chargers.

When it gets quiet, and nobody’s bringing you problems, one of two things is happening.

The first: you’ve made yourself unapproachable, and nobody wants to tell you anything. That one’s real. James Detert and Ethan Burris studied more than 3,000 employees and their managers and found that a manager’s openness, meaning whether they actually listen and act on what they hear, was the most consistent predictor of whether people spoke up. And the effect was strongest among the best performers.⁴ Your best people are the ones who go quiet first when they decide talking to you is pointless.

The second, more optimistic answer: everything is fine. And that is a wonderful place to be.

You can tell which one you’ve got. Go ask. Walk the floor. Does bad news ever make it to you? If small problems still reach you, the silence probably means things are working.

And if things are working, let yourself enjoy it. There’s real value in marinating on the success of your organization for a while. Hard chargers struggle with this, because sitting still feels like failing.

There’s a great study on this from soccer. Researchers looked at 286 penalty kicks in top leagues. Goalkeepers who stayed in the center saved about a third of them. Goalkeepers who dove left or right saved about one in seven. Keepers dove almost every time anyway.⁵ When a goal gets scored, the keeper who stood still looks like he didn’t try. The keeper who dove looks like he did. So they dive. Leaders do the same thing. Doing something feels better than doing nothing, even when nothing is the right call.

The cost of doing too much

Every change a leader makes lands on someone. A worker who has settled into a process that works now has to stop, relearn, and second-guess. That hesitation runs up and down the chain: the worker isn’t sure, so their supervisor isn’t sure, so the questions come back to you. A leader who does “too much” disrupts everyone below them, even when every individual change seems small.

Heike Bruch and Jochen Menges studied more than 600 companies and named what happens when this becomes a habit: the acceleration trap.⁶ People get overloaded with too many activities, then asked to do too many different kinds of things at once, and then kept at that pace with no end in sight. People can handle a sprint. What wears them out is the sprint that never ends.

So keep changes small, unless something truly needs a big one.

The 90-day rule

I’ve worked for a lot of leaders who refuse to change anything for their first 90 days. I think that’s a good standard. I don’t love absolutes, though, and the literature doesn’t really give you one either.

Michael Watkins wrote The First 90 Days, the book most people mean when they talk about this.⁷ His advice isn’t to freeze for three months. It’s to diagnose what you walked into before you act. He sorts situations into five types: start-up, turnaround, accelerated growth, realignment, and sustaining success. A turnaround needs action, fast. Sustaining success is mostly about not breaking what works, though he’s clear it isn’t just playing defense either. The 90-day rule is a good default because most of us can’t tell which situation we’re in on day one.

There’s an old idea called Chesterton’s fence: if you find a fence in a field and don’t know why it’s there, don’t tear it down until you find out. Same with processes you inherit.

There’s a type of person in every organization who doesn’t feel accomplished until they’ve improved a process. That’s a good instinct, and I’ve been that guy. Just make sure the process is actually broken before you fix it.

Closeouts

Closeouts are the perfect example in most contracting squadrons.

Nobody’s arguing closeouts don’t matter. They do. But a new leader walks in and says, “Let’s knock out X closeouts a month,” without looking at what’s already on everyone’s plate. Now you’ve tossed a wrench into a machine that was running. That isn’t a priority. It’s your desire pushed onto someone else’s workload. Then you get upset when the closeouts get pencil-whipped, done wrong, or flat-out ignored, which is exactly what you set up. And closeouts are a relatively low-risk ask. Imagine doing the same thing with something that matters more.

The dream scenario is someone with idle hands who volunteers to knock some out. That happens. But be careful relying on it, because the people who volunteer for extra work tend to be your most ambitious people. They’re often the same people carrying your critical work. If your closeout plan depends on them, you may be pulling them off something that matters more.

The actual point

Wanting your team to do closeouts isn’t wrong. Wanting a process to be better isn’t wrong. Even writing a new rule after a mistake isn’t always wrong. But if you’re going to add something, whether it’s a rule, a process, or a priority, you owe your people a few answers first:

1. Is it actually broken? How do you know? One bad outcome, or a pattern?
2. Could education fix it instead? One conversation is cheaper than a policy that lives forever.
3. What does it cost, and who pays? Hours, attention, and hesitation all count.
4. What comes off their plate to make room? If the answer is “nothing,” you haven’t prioritized anything. You’ve just added.
5. What’s the plan? Who does it, when, how you’ll know it worked, and when you’ll stop.
6. Can you start smaller? One team, one month, or one contract type before everyone.

If you can’t answer those, you’re not leading change. You’re just making noise.

Sometimes the best thing a new leader can do is nothing. Watch, listen, and let a good organization be good for a while.