What's a compliance guy doing in the Gutenberg Museum?

Looking for Compliance In The Wild. I'm researching a keynote, and it turns out a 15th-century printer has lots to teach us about rules.

Nobody knows what Johannes Gutenberg looked like.

The man who made it possible for all of us to publish left no portrait from his lifetime. Every image of him is guesswork, created after he died. So the museum has solved the problem: you get to be him.

But it wasn't the only gap I found.

His famous Bibles were printed only in black, with spaces left empty for customisation. Each copy then went to an illuminator, who filled them in with colour. So the most famous example of mass standardisation in history has no two copies alike.

Gutenberg's process separated the parts which needed to be identical, and which didn't.

That's a lesson for anyone who writes rules. Every policy has gaps. You can't anticipate every situation, and people will always fill the spaces you leave. The question is whether you design those spaces, or leave people to fill them with guesswork.

There's a nice irony in me being here this week, of all weeks. Because this is the week I start inviting readers to personalise their copies of Humanizing Rules. A book about rules, where no two copies will look the same.

I'd like to think Gutenberg would approve.