They are the laws that govern the design of social systems. There are 16 laws, each one of which we find important in the design of better outcomes. They are:
Law 1 – Pursuit of individual happiness drives the human condition; it is the mission.
Law 2 – We are endowed by our creator with a free will to pursue our individual happiness.
Law 3 – We pursue our happiness as inescapably fallible creatures. We will do things that, in hindsight, we never intended to do.
Law 4 – We live in a world of limited resources. This, in part, drives the competitive nature of the human condition.
Law 5 – While happiness is the mission, it is life, liberty, and property that are the three primary values – these are the things we strive to protect against outside intrusion.
Law 6 – One person’s pursuit of happiness will inevitably conflict with someone else’s pursuit of happiness.
Law 7 – When faced with a dilemma between service to self and service to others, humans will often choose self over others. Altruism is a deliberate task requiring hard work.
Law 8 – When more than two humans exist, coalitions will inevitably form to work to the benefit of the subgroup.
Law 9 – Collective happiness is important to our individual happiness.
Law 10 – Because we humans are imperfect and resources are limited, systems are necessarily imperfect.
Law 11 – All systems suffer from the design trades – maximizing performance toward one value will ultimately hurt another value, or the mission itself. The closer we get to perfection toward any one value, the higher the costs to other values.
Law 12 – Societies advance across all values only when human productivity gains provide more resources to the world of still limited resources.
Law 13 – Feedback (learning) systems are essential in our stewardship of limited resources, whether it be for our personal or collective happiness.
Law 14 – Imposers are required for our shared happiness. We create imposers to promote happiness by protecting the life and property of others, and sometimes, of ourselves. Imposers use restraints on our liberty as the principal tool to exercise their control. The penalties for nonconformance involve restrictions on property, liberty, and sometimes life.
Law 15 – We humans are system components. We exist in systems with notions of duty guiding our paths. Duties come from the imposers, often guided by deity-based notions of right and wrong.
Law 16 – Justice is the glue that holds social systems together. Justice is the mechanism for responding to breaches of duty, for holding each other to account for our roles as societal components.
To read more on the laws, please download The Proposition.
I just love the way Fiona has such passion for her work and really believes in the purpose of Just Culture.