The Rules You Never Made
I overhear it sometimes at work.
“Ariel likes it this way.”
And I always stop and wonder: Did I actually say that? And if I did, did I explain the why behind it, or the how it should be applied?
More often than not, I remember saying something like it—or I remember saying something like it in a specific situation, with caveats I had hoped would travel with the opinion or preference at the time.
Sometimes the caveats don’t travel. Understandably. As managers, we try to give the why and the explanation. But in the interest of speed, or in the desire to create a clear black-and-white rule that’s easier to follow, the explanation gets shed. What remains is THE RULE.
The preference becomes policy. The context disappears. And suddenly there are these new, sometimes hard and fast rules folks start working by.
Let me tell you about the green cover.
When I became Editor-in-Chief of InStyle, the “no green on covers” rule was shared with me immediately—not directly from Martha Nelson, the legendary editor who founded InStyle and went on to become Editor-in-Chief of all of Time Inc., but indirectly through the team. “Martha doesn’t like green on covers,” they told me. Gospel.
But the why behind it wasn’t always shared. So people filled in their own explanations. Some insisted there was consumer research proving green didn’t sell. Others swore it was technical: green was hard to control on printing presses and could look muddy under newsstand lighting, where potential consumers evaluated a magazine and its level of interest in less than three seconds. Still others said green just wasn’t aspirational enough for fashion.
The reality? This wasn’t unique to InStyle. It was an industry-wide superstition passed around magazine publishing for decades. A self-fulfilling prophecy: editors believed green covers underperformed, so they avoided green, which meant there was never enough data to prove or disprove it.
Meanwhile, red was gospel in the opposite direction. Red sold. That’s why InStyle’s logo was black and white type knocked out of a red banner at the top of every cover—positioned high enough to stay visible even when other magazines partially covered us on the newsstand.
At InStyle, designers treated green like radioactive material. People were genuinely terrified of it.
Or maybe it was just one of those things everyone believed because everyone else believed it.
By the time I inherited the rule, the original context had vanished. What remained was the rule itself, treated as absolute truth.
This happens everywhere.
In every company. In every industry. In every creative field where someone senior has opinions (which is to say: all of them).
A leader makes a comment. It gets repeated. Then it gets distorted. Then it gets amplified. Context disappears. Nuance evaporates. What was a situational observation—”I didn’t love how this specific thing worked in this specific instance”—becomes an absolute rule: “Leadership hates this. Never do it.”
And the person who originally said it? They often don’t even remember.
Why does this happen?
Because people are trying to be good at their jobs. They’re trying to anticipate what leadership wants. They’re trying to avoid mistakes. So they listen carefully to what senior people say, and they remember it, and they apply it broadly to avoid screwing up.
It’s not malicious. It’s not even wrong, exactly. It’s just... human.
But it can be poison for brands and creativity.
Here’s why these phantom rules are so dangerous:
They create fear-based decision making and kill experimentation. When people believe there’s a list of forbidden things, they stop taking creative risks. Innovation dies not because leadership shut it down, but because the team never even proposed it.
They make everything generic. When multiple companies in the same industry are all avoiding the same things, everything starts to look the same. Not because there’s one right answer, but because everyone’s avoiding the same imaginary wrong answers.
They waste time and resources. Energy that could go toward making something great gets spent navigating a labyrinth of mythological constraints.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth: most leaders don’t realize they’re creating these rules.
They think they’re just sharing their perspective. Offering feedback. Thinking out loud. They don’t realize that every casual comment is being catalogued, codified, and turned into organizational law.
Now when I hear “Ariel doesn’t like that,” my first reaction is: Wait. When did I say that as a universal rule?
My second reaction is: What was the context? What problem was I trying to solve? Was I talking about a principle or a preference?
Because here’s what we know: Preferences are not principles.
A principle is something like “prioritize the customer experience over our own convenience.” That’s a rule. That should be followed.
A preference is “I don’t love how this shade of blue looks with this particular font in this specific application.” That’s situational. That’s contextual. That shouldn’t become law.
But organizations don’t naturally distinguish between the two. So everything a leader says gets treated with equal weight. And before you know it, there’s a team that thinks their leader has passionate opinions about things they barely remember mentioning.
And if you don’t know the why, it’s hard not to misapply the how and when.
People should be encouraged to ask. And managers should be thinking about underlining the specifics when sharing an opinion—making clear what’s universal and what’s contextual.
So what do we do about it?
If you’re a leader:
Be mindful of what you say casually. Our words carry more weight than we realize. What feels like thinking out loud gets heard as directive.
Add context. Instead of “I don’t like this,” try “I didn’t love this in this situation because it didn’t solve for X.” Give people the why behind your reaction, not just the reaction itself.
Encourage questioning. Make it safe for people to ask “Is that actually a rule, or was that a contextual preference?”
Model breaking your own rules. If you realize something you once said has become organizational mythology, publicly break it. Show your team that context matters more than consistency.
If you’re on a team:
Question the mythology. When someone says “leadership doesn’t like that,” ask: “Where did that rule come from? Who said it? When? In what context?”
Seek the original source. If there’s time and it matters, go ask the person who supposedly made the rule. You might discover they they said something much more nuanced.
Test the boundaries. Sometimes the best way to find out if a rule is real is to break it thoughtfully and see what happens. (Within reason. Don’t be reckless. But also, don’t be paralyzed by phantom constraints.)
The best brands aren’t built on avoiding what the boss doesn’t like.
They’re built on understanding why decisions work in specific contexts—and having the courage to experiment when contexts change.
They’re built by teams that feel empowered to say “I know we haven’t done this before, but here’s why I think we should try it.”
They’re built by leaders who remember that their job isn’t to create rules, but to create the conditions for good work.
And sometimes, that means putting green on the cover.