There is an image I keep returning to whenever I think about leading communities. A river and a bridge. If the bridge is too strong and the river too weak, the bridge chokes it: the current presses against the piers, stagnates, stops being alive. If the river is too strong, it sweeps the bridge away, and people have no way left to reach the other bank.
It was told to me as a Japanese parable. I went looking for the original, and to be honest, I could not find a parable with exactly this plot. So below I treat it as an image in the spirit of the Eastern tradition, not as a quote from a specific text. What I did find was more interesting than a parable.
Bridges that are allowed to break
Japan has a type of bridge called nagarebashi, "flowing bridges". Their wooden decks are deliberately not fixed to the piers: in a flood the deck lifts off and floats downstream while the piers stay in place. The reasoning is that a bridge that is too strong catches logs and debris, turns into a dam, and the water breaks its banks. After the flood, people simply lay the deck back down (Japanese Wikipedia on nagarebashi).
NHK tells the story of one such bridge in Iwate that dates back to samurai times: it is designed to collapse when the water rises, and every time, the local people rebuild it together (NHK World, "The Stories behind Japan's Bridges").
What strikes me here is not the engineering but the philosophy. These people did not try to defeat the river. They built a structure that knows its limit, and they made rebuilding a shared task.
Water in the Tao Te Ching
The wider roots of this image are in the Taoist tradition. Chapter 8 of the Tao Te Ching, in James Legge's translation, says: "The highest excellence is like (that of) water." And chapter 78: "Every one in the world knows that the soft overcomes the hard, and the weak the strong, but no one is able to carry it out in practice" (Tao Te Ching, Legge translation, ctext.org).
That last clause is the most honest part for me. Knowing is easy. Carrying it out is hard.
Next to it sits the idea of yin and yang: two opposites that do not fight but complete each other. Structure as force, masculine energy: frame, boundary, rule. Flow as life, feminine energy: initiative, relationships, compromise, movement. Neither is "right". Only the balance is, and it is never set once and for all.
When there are too few rules
For many years I have worked with civic organizations and business communities, among them the Ternopil Business Council and Board Ternopil, as well as communities around artificial intelligence such as Impact AI Club. And I see the same picture at the start of almost every community.
At first there are no rules, and it is wonderful. Energy, enthusiasm, everyone is "one of us". Bylaws and procedures feel like bureaucracy that will kill the spirit. But sooner or later the first conflict arrives. Someone believes their voice should count more. Someone uses the community to sell. Two members cannot agree who owns a project. And it turns out the community has no mechanism to resolve this without resentment. Whoever is louder decides, or whoever leaves first.
That is a river without a bridge. Plenty of force, but nothing that lets people cross to the other bank together.
When there are too many rules
The other extreme shows up in mature organizations. A procedure for every step. Approvals of approvals. A policy answering questions nobody ever asked. People stop proposing things, because every initiative drowns in process. On paper everything works. In reality, the life has gone out of the organization.
That is a bridge that has choked the river. The water stands still, and nothing grows in it any more.
The most dangerous part is that these rules were usually written with good intentions. Each appeared after some problem. But nobody checked whether they were still needed.
How I look for the balance
At MagneticOne Group we have company policies, and I stopped seeing them as something fixed a long time ago. A few principles that help me both in business and in civic work:
- A rule appears after a recurring problem, not just in case. One conflict can be solved by a conversation. Three identical ones ask for a rule.
- Piers separately, deck separately. Like a nagarebashi. A few things do not change: values, how decisions are made, ethics. Everything else can be lifted off and laid down anew.
- Every rule has an owner and a review date. If nobody can explain why it exists, its time is up.
- Rules for conflicts are written before the conflicts. In calm times people agree more honestly.
- Rebuilding is a shared task. When something breaks, the point is not to find someone to blame but to lay the deck back down together.
The courage to change the rules
There is one more thing people rarely talk about when it comes to policies. Writing a rule is relatively easy. Admitting that a rule which once saved us now gets in the way, and changing it, is much harder. It takes courage: it means admitting we did not foresee something, and it risks upsetting the people who have grown used to the rule.
For me this is the same as constantly reinventing yourself. A person who at forty lives by rules written at twenty is rarely free. So is an organization.
The idea is very old. In Plato's Cratylus, Socrates recounts Heraclitus: "Heracleitus is supposed to say that all things are in motion and nothing at rest; he compares them to the stream of a river, and says that you cannot go into the same water twice" (Plato, Cratylus, tr. Benjamin Jowett, Project Gutenberg). The river again.
Ecclesiastes says: "To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven" (Ecclesiastes 3:1, KJV). Indian and Buddhist traditions speak of samsara, the wheel of birth and change. The Chinese I Ching is literally the Book of Changes. And Nietzsche in The Joyful Wisdom asks a hard question about eternal recurrence: what if a demon told you that "This life, as thou livest it at present, and hast lived it, thou must live it once more, and also innumerable times" (Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom, §341, Project Gutenberg)? For me that is a question to ask of any rule: would I agree to live with it again and again?
All these traditions say the same thing in different ways: the wheel keeps turning. The piers of the bridge stand, but the water under it is different every time.
Why this matters especially now, with AI
A few years ago a company policy could live quietly for three to five years. Today, with the arrival of artificial intelligence, the way we write, analyze, sell, train people and make decisions is changing. A data policy written a year ago may either forbid what has already become normal, or say nothing about what has become a risk.
So I see two traps. The first: keep the old rules because "it has always been this way", and watch people quietly work around them. The second: write a new rule for every new tool, and within six months end up with a bridge that chokes the river again. My way out is to review rules more often, in shorter cycles, and keep only the piers fixed: values, ethics, accountability. The rest of the deck we will now be relaying far more often than we are used to.
When discipline becomes freedom
Jocko Willink, a former Navy SEAL commander, called his book Discipline Equals Freedom. Its description says: "There is only one way to achieve true freedom: The Way of Discipline."
For a long time that phrase felt like a contradiction to me. Now I see it not as the opposite of flow but as a stage of development. For a person or a community at the start of the road, rules feel like a cage. But at a certain level of maturity they stop being external. Nobody has to remind people of them, because people understand why they exist. Then structure does not constrain but frees: energy is not spent arguing about the obvious, it goes into movement.
So discipline does not always equal freedom. It becomes freedom when it has been accepted rather than imposed. And that road cannot be skipped, only walked.
What the great traditions say
When I started thinking about the link between discipline and freedom, I was struck by how differently, and at the same time how unanimously, philosophical schools and religions speak about it. A few examples, with sources.
- Stoicism. Epictetus opens the Enchiridion with: "There are things which are within our power, and there are things which are beyond our power." And then: "the things within our power are by nature free" (Epictetus, The Enchiridion, Project Gutenberg). Freedom starts with what I truly govern: myself.
- Aristotle. "We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts." And right after, about states: legislators make citizens good by forming habits in them (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, MIT Classics). The discipline of one person and the good order of a city are directly linked.
- Buddhism. Dhammapada, verse 160: "One truly is the protector of oneself; who else could the protector be? With oneself fully controlled, one gains a mastery that is hard to gain" (Dhammapada, ch. 12, tr. Buddharakkhita, Access to Insight).
- Taoism. Tao Te Ching, chapter 33: "He who overcomes others is strong; he who overcomes himself is mighty" (Tao Te Ching, tr. Legge, sacred-texts.com).
- Confucianism. Confucius on his own path: "At seventy, I could follow what my heart desired, without transgressing what was right" (Analects 2.4, tr. Legge, Project Gutenberg). For me this is the most precise description of the moment discipline becomes freedom: the outer rule and the inner wish coincide. And it took a whole life.
- Christianity. The apostle Paul: "For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another" (Galatians 5:13, KJV). Here freedom is immediately turned toward others.
- Judaism. Pirkei Avot 4:1: "Who is mighty? He who subdues his [evil] inclination" (Pirkei Avot 4:1, Sefaria).
- Islam. The Islamic tradition calls work on oneself tazkiyah, the purification of the soul. The Quran says: "Successful indeed is the one who purifies their soul, and doomed is the one who corrupts it!" (Quran 91:9-10, Quran.com).
- Hinduism. Bhagavad Gita 6.5: "Elevate yourself through the power of your mind, and not degrade yourself, for the mind can be the friend and also the enemy of the self" (Bhagavad Gita 6.5, holy-bhagavad-gita.org).
- Hryhorii Skovoroda. The Ukrainian philosopher's grave carries, at his own request, the words «Світ ловив мене, та не впіймав…», "The world tried to catch me, but did not" (Hryhorii Skovoroda, Ukrainian Wikipedia). He lived an inwardly free life precisely because he chose very strictly what to give up.
Different centuries, different languages, different gods, and yet a shared conclusion. The greatest freedom is not given from outside. You earn it on your own, by working on yourself. And through yourself you change everything around you: a team, an organization, a community, a city, a hromada, a country and, in the end, the world. A bridge that can withstand the river is built by people who can hold themselves.
Questions for you
- Is your organization or community closer right now to a river without a bridge, or to a bridge that has choked the river?
- Which rule in your team should have been lifted long ago, because the problem it was written for no longer exists?
- What are the "piers" that must stay fixed for you, and what can be a light deck?
- Have you had a moment when discipline really did become freedom? What exactly changed?
I would be grateful if you shared.