Why the rules look weird.

The most important systems are not designed to optimize performance. They are designed to prevent predictable failure. Most rules in those systems describe the normal case. The handful that do not — that interrupt, constrain, or pre-resolve a specific exploit — are the rules doing the real integrity work. Sports rules are the cleanest place to see this discipline. The system is visible, the failure modes have been observed at scale, and the rule book has been pressure-tested for decades under conditions as adversarial as any rule book faces.

The Infield Fly Rule

Baseball. With runners on first and second, or bases loaded, and fewer than two outs, the batter hits a fair fly ball that an infielder can catch with ordinary effort. The umpire calls the batter out immediately — whether or not the fielder catches the ball. Almost every new fan finds this rule confusing. It exists because without it, an infielder could intentionally drop the ball, force the runners into uncertainty about whether to advance, and convert one out into a double play the offense had no defense against. The rule does not describe normal play. It pre-resolves a known asymmetry that would otherwise reward an intentional drop.

That move (pre-resolving an exploit before it can be exploited) is the most underused discipline in institutional design. Every governance document I have read at scale describes what people should do. Almost none of them name the specific exploits the structure would otherwise reward, and pre-resolve them. The Infield Fly Rule is what a rule book looks like when someone asked what the rules are for: closing the loopholes that ordinary play would otherwise open.

The Free Guard Zone

Curling. For the first five rocks of every end, no stone in the free guard zone (the area between the hog line and the tee line, excluding the house) can be removed from play. The rule arrived in the 1990s after every team converged on the same strategy: take out, take out, take out. It has been widened since. The current five-rock version has been in force in international play since the 2018–19 season. The dominant strategy worked. It also collapsed the game — low scores, sterile play. The rule was added to stop rational optimization from destroying the thing the game was built to be.

This is Goodhart’s Law built into the rules, not just cited as a warning. (Originally Charles Goodhart’s 1975 observation that statistical regularities collapse once they are targeted for policy, popularly reformulated by Marilyn Strathern in 1997 as “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”) Every metric eventually gets gamed. Every KPI eventually rewards the behavior that hits the number rather than the behavior the number was meant to encourage. The metric will get gamed. The discipline is writing the rule that stops the gaming from destroying what the metric was meant to measure. A funder whose impact metric inadvertently rewards risk-averse program design needs the Free Guard Zone equivalent: the rule that prevents the rational pursuit of the metric from killing what the metric was meant to encourage. In my experience, few funders have that rule written down.

Measurement scientists have a name for the pattern the Free Guard Zone was written to prevent: construct-irrelevant strategies — responses that hit the score without demonstrating the thing the score was built to measure. Samuel Messick named construct-irrelevant variance as one of the two main threats to validity. In automated essay scoring, my colleagues and I called one version of it construct-irrelevant response strategies; Before it was called AI evaluation tells that story. The AI benchmark community has been rediscovering it under other names — reward hacking, specification gaming, Goodhart taxonomy — as models learn to score high on evaluations without learning the underlying skill. Same problem, different domain. That’s why the weird rule has to be written before the metric goes live.

Soccer Offside

A player is offside if they are in the opposing team’s half AND closer to the opposing goal line than both the ball and the second-to-last defender when their teammate plays the ball. Generations of new fans have asked: why is this a rule? The answer is that without it, the optimal strategy is to camp a fast striker near the opposing goal and play long balls over the top. The midfield empties. The game shrinks to two penalty boxes with a void between them. The structure of the game disappears in pursuit of the most efficient way to score.

Offside preserves the distributed structure of the game. It forces play through the midfield. It rewards the coordinated movement that is the game. The institutional parallel is direct: organizations that do not have rules preventing the cherry-pick (the function that bypasses the structure because it can, the team that goes around the process because it is faster) eventually discover that the structure has dissolved. The rule that prevents cherry-picking is not a rule about how to play. It is a rule about preserving the playing field. The cross-functional processes I have watched fail did so because the rule that protected the structure was never written. The cherry-pickers won, and the field collapsed.

The Advantage Rule

Soccer and rugby. When a foul occurs, the referee can choose not to enforce it if enforcing it would penalize the team that was fouled — if, for example, the fouled team is in the middle of a promising attacking move that a free kick would interrupt. The rule exists because rigid enforcement of process compliance can defeat the purpose of the process. The fouled team is the team the rule was written to protect; enforcing the foul would punish them. The referee has the authority to say: not now.

Readers of this library run into this rule constantly. Foundations enforce reporting requirements that consume the program officer’s week and prevent the program officer from doing the work the reporting was meant to evidence. Healthcare networks enforce documentation rituals that pull clinicians away from the clinical work the documentation was meant to track. Schools enforce compliance audits that consume the principal’s bandwidth and prevent the principal from supporting the teachers the audit was meant to evaluate. The Advantage Rule names the discipline that resolves this: process compliance is not the same as serving the mission. The referee’s authority to wave off the foul, when enforcing it would defeat the foul’s purpose, is what keeps the institution serving its mission rather than its bureaucracy. Most institutions do not have this rule written down. The senior people who run the institution apply it informally (the program officer who quietly skips a step that would derail a grantee, the dean who lets a faculty member miss a deadline that would damage the research), and the system depends on their discretion to function. The rule that names that discretion, and gives the operator formal authority to use it without breaking the rules, is one of the most useful rules an institution can have. In my experience, few institutions have it.

The Baton Exchange Zone

Track and field, the 4×100 relay. Runners must complete the baton handoff within a 30-meter exchange zone. The cleanest handoffs can beat the fastest runners. The interface (the place where one runner meets the next) is where the race is decided. A team with four world-record-holding individual sprinters and a sloppy handoff loses to a team with four ordinary runners and a clean one. The rule structures the interface and makes the interface itself the locus of accountability.

The organizational failures I have watched up close happened at interfaces. The handoff between admissions and financial aid. The handoff between the clinician and the population-health analyst. The handoff between the program team and the impact-reporting team. The handoff between the data engineer and the governance committee. The work inside each function is rarely the problem. The handoff between them almost always is. The Baton Exchange Zone says: name the interface, structure it, and put accountability there. Most institutional process maps show the boxes. They do not show the handoffs. The rule book that shows the handoffs, and gives each one its own zone and its own rules, is the one that wins races.

Five structural lessons

Those are the five rules, and none of them describes normal play.

The rules that matter most in any decision system are the ones that prevent optimization from destroying the thing the system was built to preserve. The Infield Fly Rule pre-resolves an exploit. The Free Guard Zone prevents convergent over-optimization. Offside preserves distributed structure. The Advantage Rule defends the mission against process. The Baton Exchange Zone structures the interface.

Behavioral rules — the clarification

One clarification, so this doesn’t land wrong. Behavioral rules (the ones that tell people what to do inside their function) are not optional. A relay team that cannot run does not win because the handoff was clean. A funder whose program officers cannot write coherent goals does not get rescued by a Free Guard Zone equivalent. Behavioral rules are the baseline; they have to be in place and executed for the structural rules to matter at all. This essay is about the layer above that baseline — the rules that govern what happens between functions, and that pre-resolve the exploits behavioral compliance alone cannot prevent. Most institutions have the behavioral layer; what they typically lack is the structural layer. The argument is for both, with attention to the half that is usually missing.

The rule book that works

Every institution has these rules implicit somewhere. Most do not have them written. The board policies describe how to make decisions; rarely do they pre-resolve the exploits the structure would otherwise reward. The strategy documents describe how to grow; rarely do they name the rule that prevents the growth metric from hollowing the product. The org charts describe the functions; rarely do they show the interfaces between functions, where the actual accountability has to live. The compliance frameworks describe the requirements; rarely do they include the operator’s authority to wave them off when they would defeat their own purpose.

When a leader asks me what they should be writing down that their predecessors did not, this is the answer. The answer is the weird-looking rules, not more policies for the normal case. Those rules will not look like a strategy document. They will look like a baseball umpire calling a batter out for a ball that was never caught. That is what working governance looks like up close.

One corollary. G. K. Chesterton put it as a heuristic a century ago: never remove a fence until you know why it was put there. The rule that looks weird is probably the one holding the game together. If you cannot say what predictable failure it was written to prevent, the safest assumption is that someone before you could — and that removing it will reveal, at cost, the exploit the rule was there to close.

The rules that prevent predictable failure look weird at first reading. That is how to recognize them.

Written July 2026 for the Analytic Bytes Library. The five rules are drawn from baseball, curling, soccer, rugby, and track and field; the institutional parallels reflect patterns observed across higher education, foundations, healthcare, and mission-driven organizations. Goodhart’s Law is included as the closest available warning about the pattern the Free Guard Zone was written to prevent.