The same phenomenon can apply to organizations as well. Teachers and doctors in the US, for example, seem to have lost a substantial degree of discretion in how ply their respective trades. They instead must operate in compliance with an ever-growing number of runbooks prescribed to them by their relative authorities.
This is likely driven in part to raise the floor in outcomes but it simultaneously lowers the ceiling.
> Teachers and doctors in the US, for example, seem to have lost a substantial degree of discretion in how ply their respective trades.
Mostly that is good. Discretion implies different results for different people and if you are on the bad end of that because you got a bad teacher/doctor that is a bad thing. Most people need the standard treatment in both education and medicine. Learning styles has been debunked in the literature, kids don't need a teacher who believes in that. Likewise most people have the same thing as everyone else - but there are a few one in a million exceptions that mean we need to go through the entire checklist before giving the regular treatment even though odds are the doctor will never see the exception. (sometimes that is give the regular treatment but see you again in 2 weeks to see if it is working which is annoying when the doctor normally says all is well)
There is a time for discretion. However that time is when you are a proper researcher looking for other treatments (under the watch of an ethics board), or when you have clearly exhausted all the normal things and they don't work (sometimes the checklist even says we don't know what to do here, try something and if it works we will adjust the checklist for next time.
The above is how flying got to be so safe. Decades of examining everything that went wrong - including near misses - and figuring out how to prevent them. Some doctors still struggle to remember to properly wash their hands by contrast.
This is likely driven in part to raise the floor in outcomes but it simultaneously lowers the ceiling.