Watching the range at Royal Birkdale this week, the players are all carrying laser rangefinders, lining up shots, checking exact yardages against the flag. Come Thursday, every one of those devices disappears. Rangefinders are permitted in practice rounds under the Model Local Rule, and banned outright the moment competitive play starts. Same players, same course, same week, two completely different rules, and nobody treats that as a contradiction.
Most organisations can’t hold two different rules for two different contexts without someone accusing them of moving the goalposts. Golf manages it without anyone blinking.
A rule that flexes by context isn’t a weaker rule
The instinct in most workplaces is to write one policy and apply it everywhere, because a single rule is easier to defend than a rule with conditions attached. But a single rule applied to genuinely different situations usually ends up wrong in at least one of them. Practice and competition aren’t the same activity wearing different names. One is about preparation, the other about a level playing field under pressure, and the rule that serves one badly serves the other well.
A code of conduct isn’t governance until someone gets removed, and the same logic applies here in reverse: a rule that applies identically regardless of context often isn’t thoughtful governance either. It’s just the easiest rule to write. The R&A wrote two.
The access nobody questions
The range itself runs on the same credential logic as everything else this week. Players and caddies in one tier, coaches and swing technicians in another, family and support staff in a third. Spectators watch from a fixed viewing zone and never set foot on the surface. Nobody argues about who belongs where, because the zones are physically separated, not just policed by a sign asking people to stay back.
You won’t notice the security operation at The Open, and that’s the entire point of it. The range access model is a smaller version of the same idea. The launch monitors and screens running in that compound draw power off the same temporary generator build as the rest of the site, an unglamorous branch of the same infrastructure project that keeps everything else invisible until it isn’t.
Write the rule for the situation, not the org chart
If your organisation has one policy trying to cover two genuinely different situations, stop assuming consistency means using the same words in both places. Consistency means applying the right judgement to each context, even if that produces two different rules. A rangefinder is fine on Tuesday and banned on Thursday, and nobody at The Open thinks that’s confused. It’s precise.
Ben Webb is a Sydney-based project delivery leader and 2022 AIPM Project Manager of the Year. He writes about why most project management is theatre, and what actual delivery looks like without it.
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