"The absence of failure is not evidence of success.
Standards protect teams from the most common lie: “just this once.” In a production change that is safe only if the rules hold, the purpose is not to be strict; it is to stay consistent under stress.
In a production change that is safe only if the rules hold, the exception will sound reasonable and urgent. If the exception path is fuzzy, enforcement becomes personal and the standard becomes optional. That is how dissent turns into resentment. A single written sentence can remove more noise than another meeting, because it stops the renegotiation loop.
Eliot Jaques is useful here because it forces precision. Write the bar as a yes/no check, then name the exception trigger and decision owner. Make the exception rare so the standard stays real.