Becoming more bureaucratic kills companies. And yet no one who introduces measures that make a company more bureaucratic ever seems to realize they're doing it. All they see is the upside.
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Can you define exactly what you mean by “bureaucracy” here? I think I intuitively agree, but I’m struggling to articulate exactly what counts. What metric would you use to measure the extent of bureaucracy in a company?
Off the top of my head, rules for doing things that don't follow automatically from the nature of the thing being done. E.g. not driving off the edge of the road is part of driving, whereas not driving over 55 mph is an externally imposed rule.
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Have to imagine that the externally imposed rule exists for a reason.
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This strikes me as a terrible example. In this case the example of bureaucracy is a direct corrective to an activity pattern that produces undesirable outcomes of high magnitude and probability. You've described bureaucracy as a system for driving desirable outcomes.
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Like a team having to go to a mandatory weekly sync meeting. Managers see upside to keep folks on the same page while coerced participants may wish to get their part done & opt out of a meeting that may waste their time. Challenging!
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@CTO_ai we push for more “opt-in” meetings which are similar to breakouts or office hours. We also tell team members to leave meetings that they do not feel are useful. This shifts the burden onto the person who is organizing the meeting to justify the cost of switching context. - Show replies
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becoming more bureaucracy is the descent into pessimism example in software dev are guard rails & heavy tooling: testing, staging, source control, type systems, compile steps, exception handling etc compared to a fast optimistic path
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as time passes + amount of people increases: people arguing *for* bureaucracy can point to tangible examples and appeal to reason. the cost is less tangible. related but in different context: LISP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing
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Good and simple example/explanation of what beauracracy is.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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I think a big part of the problem is when the company starts creating processes in response to one-off anomalies. One person reimburses herself maliciously, and then everybody has to fill a giant form to get reimbursed to prevent it from happening again.
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Agreed. Theory X (hold everyone accountable for the mistakes of one) vs Theory Y (hold the individual accountable) in a nutshell. Our company went from Theory Y (startup), to hard Theory X (medium sized company) now back to Theory Y, and thriving in a post process driven culture.
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this is an interesting example.. when there's only a few people on the road (startups), a speed limit is prolly net negative. But as the density of people around the car (e.g. larger co's), the size of the negative externality imposed by speed [in an accident] should increase?
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disclaimer: I dislike bureaucracy & actively seek to minimize it when possible, and yet... I think I can also see how it makes sense in more social-coordination-dense settings (such as large companies vs small companies), depending on how you define it (as always)
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