Here’s the good news: The big airlines are revising their rules for booking and boarding flights — rules that led to one of the great business fiascos in recent history, United 3411. Here’s the bad news: If the long-term lesson that leaders of the airline business (or any other business) take away from this episode is that it’s time to rewrite policies and practices, to fine-tune bureaucratic procedures, then they will have missed a huge, perhaps even historic, learning opportunity. The truly important lesson, one that applies to companies in all sorts of fields, has to do with the grave shortcomings of an approach to business, culture, and customer service that relies on rules, procedures, and guidelines at the expense of common sense, improvisation, and the capacity of flesh-and-blood human beings to solve problems and make sound decisions. It’s time for leaders to toss out their rule books and trust their people.

Here’s the good news: The big airlines are revising their rules for booking and boarding flights — rules that led to one of the great business fiascos in recent history, United Express Flight 3411. Here’s the bad news: If the long-term lesson that leaders of the airline business (or any other business) take away from this episode is that it’s time to rewrite policies and practices, to fine-tune bureaucratic procedures, then they will have missed a huge, perhaps even historic, learning opportunity.

The truly important lesson is one that applies to companies in all sorts of fields. It has to do with the grave shortcomings of an approach to business, culture, and customer service that relies on rules and procedures at the expense of letting flesh-and-blood human beings solve problems and make sound decisions. It’s time for leaders to toss out their rule books and trust their people.

The Wall Street Journal published an in-depth analysis of the “recipe for the disastrous decision” that triggered a front-page crisis at Chicago O’Hare International Airport. Its conclusion? The problem wasn’t with United’s employees, but with a “rules-based culture” in which 85,000 people are “reluctant to make choices” that are not in the “tomes of rule books” and “giant manuals” that govern life at the airline. In other words, employees at every level did what they were supposed to do — they followed the rules — yet the result was a total failure.

When I read the Journal analysis, I couldn’t help but think about another famous service organization, the retail giant Nordstrom, and the long-standing handbook that defines life at this 72,500-person company. The entirety of the Nordstrom Employee Handbook fits on a single 5×8 card and involves exactly one rule. Here is Rule #1: “Use best judgment in all situations. There will be no additional rules.”

No wonder Nordstrom’s image and brand is built on heroic stories of above-and-beyond service and problem solving. Sometimes those stories even involve the airlines. In one case, an employee discovered that a customer had left her luggage (along with her flight itinerary) in the parking lot of a Nordstrom store in Connecticut. So he hopped in his car, drove her luggage to JFK, and reached her before the flight left. There’s no rule that can foresee that kind of problem or response!

Truth be told, life inside most giant organizations is much closer to the rules-obsessed culture of the big airline than the common-sense freedoms of a high-end retailer. Have you ever tried to explain your special family circumstances to a health insurance provider? Or hoped for satisfaction during a painfully robotic conversation with a cellphone company or internet service provider? Or asked for a common-sense exception to established policies and procedures from a financial services conglomerate?

Good luck with that! As leaders, we’ve become so obsessed with efficiency, productivity, and consistency that we’ve designed cultures that can’t handle the exceptions to the rules that real life invariably demands. And yet it’s how we handle these exceptions, for good or for ill, that increasingly defines how we’re perceived by our customers, especially in a world where social media captures and amplifies everyone’s behavior.

Mark White, a business theorist who studies what he calls “adaptive organizations,” makes an intriguing distinction between companies that are based on Roman law principles of governance and decision making and those based on common-law principles. In Roman law, White explains, anything that is not expressly permitted is forbidden. So Roman law companies rely on formal policies and bureaucratic procedures, on predetermined rules and established practices. In common law, anything that is not expressly forbidden is permitted. So common law organizations rely on fast action, nimble reactions, good judgment, and common sense. Not surprisingly, when it comes to service, empathy, and the capacity to do the right things in difficult situations, common-law organizations trump Roman law organizations, even though the biggest, most-established companies remain stuck in the Roman law mindset.

One of my favorite financial services companies is a young, fast-growing bank in the UK called Metro Bank. Metro is the ultimate challenger brand, the first new major retail bank chartered in the UK since 1835. One big reason why it’s growing so fast and generating such buzz is that it has built a culture around nimble, creative, common-sense approaches to solving customer problems — a huge difference from the bureaucratic, rules-based cultures of the UK’s Big Five established banks.

One of the few formal rules at Metro is known as “one to say yes, two to say no.” Translation: If a customer has a special request or a difficult problem, every frontline employee is authorized to solve the problem (to say “yes”) on the spot, without permission from above. If, however, a frontline employee thinks the situation should not be resolved to the customer’s satisfaction (if the answer is “no”), then that employee must receive permission from above to reject the request.

Imagine if that rule had been in force at Chicago O’Hare last week.

So as you reflect on leadership and culture after United 3411, don’t just look for opportunities to fine-tune your procedures and update your employee manuals. Give your people the chance to think for themselves, to do what makes sense, to break the rules when they confront situations where the existing rules make no sense. Rome may not have been built in a day, but the days of Roman law organizations feel like they’re numbered.