The Person Who Grants the Exception
When a rule gets too expensive, people don't repeal it — they route around it one waiver at a time. The person who approves the waivers becomes the real policy, and nobody wrote that one down either.
Engineering-Culture
The Rule Nobody Can Retell
Every process rule started as an incident. The rule outlives the story, and once the story is gone the rule can only be obeyed or resented — never evaluated.
Your Policy Is the Diff
The written ruleset only grows. The waiver path is the only place it shrinks. Neither one records why — so what your organization actually does lives in the difference between them, and nobody owns that difference.
The Count Is a Relationship
Users who give up stop filing. Teams who get ignored stop filing. Both make the same number fall, and neither required anyone to decide anything.
The Team That Answers
The same filter that shapes what users report also runs inside the building. The team that responds fastest ends up looking like the one that ships the most defects.