I’m confused by what we mean by bureaucracy. Is is a governenment-run agency, like the DMV for example? Or is it a low-feedback cost center inside of a for-profit company?
To me it seems that a bureaucracy is any organization, including a suborganization, where incentives and feedback loops weaken or become unaligned, making the whole thing more extractive toward those people it was supposed to benefit. Eg. the DMV still provides a useful service for citizens, but it does so inefficiently at a high cost. Or an IT department might not be run well, leading to blame-shifting behavior among its leadership, which will slow down any IT-related projects the larger company is demanding from it—this can go on for months or years at a big enough place because of how illegible such behavior can be made to be.
In this sense, I would absolutely expect alien to have bureaucracies. At least those aliens that need coordination mechanisms (Zerg don’t), which introduce the possibility of individuals being bad at coordinating, leading to the creation of maze-like behaviors.
P.S. Thanks for writing this. I see value in studying bureaucracies in order to make them better, so I find discussions like this very interesting.
I’m confused by what we mean by bureaucracy. Is is a governenment-run agency, like the DMV for example? Or is it a low-feedback cost center inside of a for-profit company?
To me it seems that a bureaucracy is any organization, including a suborganization, where incentives and feedback loops weaken or become unaligned, making the whole thing more extractive toward those people it was supposed to benefit. Eg. the DMV still provides a useful service for citizens, but it does so inefficiently at a high cost. Or an IT department might not be run well, leading to blame-shifting behavior among its leadership, which will slow down any IT-related projects the larger company is demanding from it—this can go on for months or years at a big enough place because of how illegible such behavior can be made to be.
In this sense, I would absolutely expect alien to have bureaucracies. At least those aliens that need coordination mechanisms (Zerg don’t), which introduce the possibility of individuals being bad at coordinating, leading to the creation of maze-like behaviors.
P.S. Thanks for writing this. I see value in studying bureaucracies in order to make them better, so I find discussions like this very interesting.