Krishna broke many rules. He asked Arjuna to hit Bhishma in the shadow of Shikandhi. He asked Arjuna to hit Karna when Karna's chariot got stuck, and he tried to take the wheel out of the mud. He also encouraged Bhima to hit Duryodhana in the thigh, which was not allowed according to the rules of battle. He is also called "Ranchod" because he decided to leave Mathura and shift his capital to Dwarka.
Rules do carry significance in our lives. Generally, rules are made to ensure harmony. If rules are followed, there would be no battle in the first place. There was a rule that the eldest of the brothers should become the king and going by that logic, Yudhistira should have become the king. But Kauravas broke all the rules and cheated Pandavas again and again to the extent of trying to murder them in Lakshagraha. Duryodhana also cheated Yudhistira in the game of Chausar and took away his kingdom of Indraprastha. Even after the Pandavas finished the term of their Vanavasa and Ajnatvasa, he refused to hand over their rights to them. There are no rules in Hastinapur. The king is blind to every injustice done to the Pandavas.
A general rule in society is that we should respect our teachers and elders. What if the elders and parents ask us to take dowry? What if the elders ask us to take bribes? What if the society promotes the exploitation of the weak? What if the elders teach us to discriminate based on caste and color? Should we accept all these things without challenging them? Probably, that is what Krishna is trying to make us aware of. In a society where the level of awareness is quite low, people often forget the genesis of rules and start using the rules for their advantage as their "winning formulas". In such a scenario everybody needs to evaluate the rules to examine whether the rules fit into the wider purpose of life? That is the message of Krishna in Bhagwad Geeta. Every work is an offering to the divine. Can we offer our deeds of "taking dowry" "taking bribe" "exploiting the weak" or "discriminating based on caste and color" to the divine? We will get an answer ourselves.
Krishna gives us complete freedom to carry out whatever work we want to do. That is why he introduced the concept of "Swadharma". In the battle of Kurukshetra, he is not asking everybody to fight the battle. Vyasa is doing his "Swadharma" by writing Mahabharata and his writings are his offering to the divine. Sanjay is doing his "Swadharma" by telling Dhritrastra what is happening on the battlefield. That is his offering to the divine. But Arjuna is a warrior and when he tries to run away from the battleground, Krishna tells him that he is running away from his "Swadharma" for fear of non-compliance with the rules of the society because the genesis of rule is not clear to him.
Society makes rules to bring harmony so that everybody can perform to the best of his abilities in the divine sacrifice. However, some greedy elements of society take control of the rules and use the rules as their "winning formulas" to force everybody to work for their interests (without being ever aware of what their self-interest really is). Other people also use rules as their "winning formulas" because following these rules gives them short-term advantages and security (because of the lack of awareness of true self-interest). However, Krishna shakes us to make us aware that the purpose behind the rules is the best use of time and energy for the divine work and not to satiate individual greed and ambitions. That is why Krishna broke free of all the frames of contemporary rules to make people aware that rules are for a purpose and the largest purpose of life is "living with awareness". Truth alone shall be a guide. I feel that we need to ask only one question while performing any action work or making a decision "Can I offer this task or decision to the divine?".
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