I think there’s a conflation happening here, turning bureaucracy into a noun and then overfitting it to all instances of bureaucracy. There are highly bureaucratic teams/organizations among the Fortune 500, and there are more agile government agencies.
1. I contend that bureaucracy develops to minimize downside risk. Organizations create rules, processes and structures with the goal of making sure tasks are constantly done the same way, and importantly, limiting (ideally preventing) the chance of something going wrong (e.g., missing critical data on a form, not looping in all of the appropriate people.)
1.a What I find most interesting is the trade-off that this implies… de-risking/limiting downside potential almost tautologically implies a restriction on upside potential. Organizations may be willing to get less out-performance from employees, in exchange for reducing the “harm” an employee could do… which is very stifling for many high-potential individuals.
When you stop and think about it so many jobs, both entry-level and management, are simply executing or overseeing some web of repeated tasks, that enable or interact with another web of repeated tasks in a different part of the organization.
2. A separate point is that many of the organizations we refer to as bureaucracies are government agencies, so the interesting question is whether bureaucracy is more prevalent in those types of organizations.
Certainly, there’s an easy narrative about not having a market to discipline them, so governmental agencies are likely to outlive their usefulness and become sclerotic.
However, I think there’s also an observation bias; the media exists in no small part to shine a light on government waste/excess. What’s more, they are generally funded by taxpayer dollars and most people have semi-regular interactions with many agencies. But ask most people how bureaucratic their employers are and you’ll likely get a tirade about HR and Operations and TPS reports that nobody reads. The reality is, most of us don’t really consider the nature of private bureaucracies on a regular basis, and if we do, it’s usually constrained to the ones we have some personal interaction wit
2.a In general, the larger the organization, the more bureaucracy you expect to find; it’s part of the “infrastructure” holding the organization together! So the interesting question here is what is the optimal amount of bureaucracy given the size/nature of your organization/project.
2.b In the long term, the point about market forces eliminating bureaucracy is probably true, with at least one caveat. Competition means that young, nimble companies are likely to eliminate stagnant, bureaucratic companies, though it may take many years for this to happen.
The caveat is regulation: government may stay in and set up standards and requirements that impose de facto bureaucracy. Beyond this direct introduction of bureaucracy (and the second-order bureaucracy meant to manage the requirements the regulation put in place), it also tends to make markets less competitive (a young startup likely can’t bear the burden of the regulation and so either doesn’t enter the market or has to find a clever way to circumnavigate them (not always a positive.) Regulation, therefore, is a form of bureaucracy and bears the same trade-offs; you give up some upside to limit some downside.
3. An interesting topic to think about is when is regulation/bureaucracy appropriate? (Warning: wandering into libertarian think-space here.) These are usually put in place to limit specific, known/anticipated downsides, but at the cost of largely unknown upsides. Of course, maybe they also limit unknown downsides. The unknown unknowns are challenging to handle… the right answer is likely to involve quick but limited/targeted regulation/bureaucracy. So there’s even more room to discuss how exactly to set that up.
I think there’s a conflation happening here, turning bureaucracy into a noun and then overfitting it to all instances of bureaucracy. There are highly bureaucratic teams/organizations among the Fortune 500, and there are more agile government agencies.
1.
I contend that bureaucracy develops to minimize downside risk. Organizations create rules, processes and structures with the goal of making sure tasks are constantly done the same way, and importantly, limiting (ideally preventing) the chance of something going wrong (e.g., missing critical data on a form, not looping in all of the appropriate people.)
1.a
What I find most interesting is the trade-off that this implies… de-risking/limiting downside potential almost tautologically implies a restriction on upside potential. Organizations may be willing to get less out-performance from employees, in exchange for reducing the “harm” an employee could do… which is very stifling for many high-potential individuals.
When you stop and think about it so many jobs, both entry-level and management, are simply executing or overseeing some web of repeated tasks, that enable or interact with another web of repeated tasks in a different part of the organization.
2.
A separate point is that many of the organizations we refer to as bureaucracies are government agencies, so the interesting question is whether bureaucracy is more prevalent in those types of organizations.
Certainly, there’s an easy narrative about not having a market to discipline them, so governmental agencies are likely to outlive their usefulness and become sclerotic.
However, I think there’s also an observation bias; the media exists in no small part to shine a light on government waste/excess. What’s more, they are generally funded by taxpayer dollars and most people have semi-regular interactions with many agencies. But ask most people how bureaucratic their employers are and you’ll likely get a tirade about HR and Operations and TPS reports that nobody reads. The reality is, most of us don’t really consider the nature of private bureaucracies on a regular basis, and if we do, it’s usually constrained to the ones we have some personal interaction wit
2.a
In general, the larger the organization, the more bureaucracy you expect to find; it’s part of the “infrastructure” holding the organization together! So the interesting question here is what is the optimal amount of bureaucracy given the size/nature of your organization/project.
2.b
In the long term, the point about market forces eliminating bureaucracy is probably true, with at least one caveat. Competition means that young, nimble companies are likely to eliminate stagnant, bureaucratic companies, though it may take many years for this to happen.
The caveat is regulation: government may stay in and set up standards and requirements that impose de facto bureaucracy. Beyond this direct introduction of bureaucracy (and the second-order bureaucracy meant to manage the requirements the regulation put in place), it also tends to make markets less competitive (a young startup likely can’t bear the burden of the regulation and so either doesn’t enter the market or has to find a clever way to circumnavigate them (not always a positive.) Regulation, therefore, is a form of bureaucracy and bears the same trade-offs; you give up some upside to limit some downside.
3. An interesting topic to think about is when is regulation/bureaucracy appropriate? (Warning: wandering into libertarian think-space here.) These are usually put in place to limit specific, known/anticipated downsides, but at the cost of largely unknown upsides. Of course, maybe they also limit unknown downsides. The unknown unknowns are challenging to handle… the right answer is likely to involve quick but limited/targeted regulation/bureaucracy. So there’s even more room to discuss how exactly to set that up.
And so it goes...