I guess we need to consider the reasons why the things we call bureaucracy exist.
One reason is that we need a division of labor, and some things require an expert, and some things are repetitive and happen in large amounts, so it makes perfect sense for some roles to have “an expert in following a checklist”, if such expect can successfully handle hundreds of cases successfully.
This can end up wrong, if a certain fraction of cases happens to be an exception to the usual situation that the checklist was made for, but the system does not handle this, e.g. there are no forks in the checklist saying “if it is none of the above, this case needs to be handled individually, forward the task to person X”.
Checklist is basically an algorithm that runs on humans, so we can use an analogy to software—programs can significantly speed up our work and reduce human error. Also, programs can contain bugs. For some reason, many people perceive this as a “yes or no” question—either we shouldn’t use checklists at all, or the checklists are sacred and suggesting that they may contain errors is a sacrilege. One of these people will sooner or later end up making important decisions in your company or country.
Due to this interaction, executives at my company decided we should develop more bureaucracy to handle their bureaucracy.
What makes sense, if your partner has a complicated bureaucracy, is to choose a few people in your organization whose tasks will be to navigate that bureaucracy… so that the rest of your organization doesn’t have to.
What doesn’t make sense is to copy all their inefficiencies. No, you (the person or the group of people selected for the role of navigating their bureaucracy) have to study them. For example, if you know that all tasks sent to their people will inevitably end up with someone who has no idea what this all is about, one person in your team could collect a short and clear explanation with all necessary information, and forward it to the people in the other organization doing the actual work (even if you already sent it to their superiors, who forgot to forward it).
Or if they have lots of extremely long meetings, you could dedicate one person to sit at those meetings and make notes. (But there is no need to send dozen your people to those meetings, just because they do.) Or you might want to have one person to check their timelines to see if anything has changed, and keep the latest known version in your wiki. For starters, I guess you could do with two people—one whose role is to collect and process all information, and one who will be sacrificed to sit at all the meetings.
Bureaucracy begets bureaucracy. Once the % of blind task-doers (people with misaligned or irrelevant incentives) reaches critical mass, the organization will often start to emit misaligned signals. This is an emergent phenomenon.
I think this is a top-down phenomenon. At the beginning, there is someone at the top of the organization who either does not care that this happens, or is not smart enough to understand that it’s happening.
More precisely, if it happens in a company, it started at the top. When it happens in a government of a democratic country, then the voters are in some sense at the top, and yes, they are misinformed and largely stupid.
Okay, now I am not sure whether I agree or disagree with you. I guess I agree that when there are many people trying to organize themselves, and no one is simultaneously smart and powerful enough to do it right… then this is the inevitable outcome. -- But if you are a boss of your company, then nothing about it is inevitable, because you happen to be the person who has the power and it supposed to be smart.
In other words, yes, dysfunction happens, and dysfunction naturally grows. It is possible to keep it under control, but it requires a smart person with the right powers (and sadly Musk on ketamin is not the right kind of person); it won’t happen automatically.
part of the job of being a bureaucrat is to justify being one.
I see a problem here. Who set up the system this way in the first place?
After 20 seconds of thinking, the first idea is to remove the necessity of justifying their jobs from the bureaucrats. Simply let them do their jobs. Find a way to evaluate their jobs that is unrelated to the necessity (if you suck at doing a useful work, you suck; if you excel at doing a needless work, we should seriously ask your boss why he assigned anyone to such work, but if it wasn’t your choice you should not be blamed for that). Make it so that if someone’s role is eliminated, they are offered a different role in the same organization rather than fired.
Ironically, sometimes trying to blindly optimize parts of a dysfunctional system creates even more dysfunction. (Such as measuring KPIs on doing work that shouldn’t exist in the first place, and implicitly threatening the people who point it out by losing their jobs.)
I guess we need to consider the reasons why the things we call bureaucracy exist.
One reason is that we need a division of labor, and some things require an expert, and some things are repetitive and happen in large amounts, so it makes perfect sense for some roles to have “an expert in following a checklist”, if such expect can successfully handle hundreds of cases successfully.
This can end up wrong, if a certain fraction of cases happens to be an exception to the usual situation that the checklist was made for, but the system does not handle this, e.g. there are no forks in the checklist saying “if it is none of the above, this case needs to be handled individually, forward the task to person X”.
Checklist is basically an algorithm that runs on humans, so we can use an analogy to software—programs can significantly speed up our work and reduce human error. Also, programs can contain bugs. For some reason, many people perceive this as a “yes or no” question—either we shouldn’t use checklists at all, or the checklists are sacred and suggesting that they may contain errors is a sacrilege. One of these people will sooner or later end up making important decisions in your company or country.
What makes sense, if your partner has a complicated bureaucracy, is to choose a few people in your organization whose tasks will be to navigate that bureaucracy… so that the rest of your organization doesn’t have to.
What doesn’t make sense is to copy all their inefficiencies. No, you (the person or the group of people selected for the role of navigating their bureaucracy) have to study them. For example, if you know that all tasks sent to their people will inevitably end up with someone who has no idea what this all is about, one person in your team could collect a short and clear explanation with all necessary information, and forward it to the people in the other organization doing the actual work (even if you already sent it to their superiors, who forgot to forward it).
Or if they have lots of extremely long meetings, you could dedicate one person to sit at those meetings and make notes. (But there is no need to send dozen your people to those meetings, just because they do.) Or you might want to have one person to check their timelines to see if anything has changed, and keep the latest known version in your wiki. For starters, I guess you could do with two people—one whose role is to collect and process all information, and one who will be sacrificed to sit at all the meetings.
I think this is a top-down phenomenon. At the beginning, there is someone at the top of the organization who either does not care that this happens, or is not smart enough to understand that it’s happening.
More precisely, if it happens in a company, it started at the top. When it happens in a government of a democratic country, then the voters are in some sense at the top, and yes, they are misinformed and largely stupid.
Okay, now I am not sure whether I agree or disagree with you. I guess I agree that when there are many people trying to organize themselves, and no one is simultaneously smart and powerful enough to do it right… then this is the inevitable outcome. -- But if you are a boss of your company, then nothing about it is inevitable, because you happen to be the person who has the power and it supposed to be smart.
In other words, yes, dysfunction happens, and dysfunction naturally grows. It is possible to keep it under control, but it requires a smart person with the right powers (and sadly Musk on ketamin is not the right kind of person); it won’t happen automatically.
I see a problem here. Who set up the system this way in the first place?
After 20 seconds of thinking, the first idea is to remove the necessity of justifying their jobs from the bureaucrats. Simply let them do their jobs. Find a way to evaluate their jobs that is unrelated to the necessity (if you suck at doing a useful work, you suck; if you excel at doing a needless work, we should seriously ask your boss why he assigned anyone to such work, but if it wasn’t your choice you should not be blamed for that). Make it so that if someone’s role is eliminated, they are offered a different role in the same organization rather than fired.
Ironically, sometimes trying to blindly optimize parts of a dysfunctional system creates even more dysfunction. (Such as measuring KPIs on doing work that shouldn’t exist in the first place, and implicitly threatening the people who point it out by losing their jobs.)