One of the first things that struck me when I first came to the US was how well things worked when things go according to plan. Everybody in the US seems to follow the rules, and things just work.

Until something unexpected happens, that is. American workers are traditionally ill-equipped to deal with situations that exceptions, precisely because they have been trained so well to follow the rules. People in my native Argentina, in contrast, are so used to rules being broken that they are experts at dealing with exceptions.

It seemed to me that there was an ideal marriage of the two. A way to specify when people are allowed to make exceptions and follow their intuition. A rule to know when to break the rules. 

In this scheme, workers, or team members, are given latitude to break the rules and do what they think is best. The latitude can be measured in many ways --number of times they can break the rules in a year, or when available, dollar value of the exceptions they make. Exceptions (or a random subset of them) are evaluated after the fact by their manager or supervisor by specifying whether they were, a posteriori, a good decision or a bad one. The latitude, or authority, is adapted accordingly. A track record of successful exception handling is rewarded with greater latitude to break the rules; and one of poor choices leads to diminished authority. Just like a credit rating leads to higher or lower spending limits, your judgment rating leads to higher or lower exception limits. Show a good enough track record and you may be allowed to bet the company --and save it-- under critical unexpected situations.

A secondary benefit of this system is employee morale. It is known that autonomy, mastery and purpose are among the primary motivators of a highly skilled workforce (Dan Pink, TED, www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html ). Adaptive Authority Allocation (AAA) promotes all three: autonomy to make decisions, mastery of the decision-making process and purpose by empowering employees to become more than a cog in the wheels of the process --an autonomous decision-maker who can significantly affect outcomes through thought.

A system like this could be especially useful in situations where exceptions are the rule --emergency management, for example. FEMA would appear like a prime candidate to implement it.

Alex Bäcker, Ph.D., with contributions by Sid Dalal, Ph.D., CTO, RAND Corporation

Who Alex Bäcker is