Conversation

The mark of a born bureaucrat is figuring out how to do something before figuring out the details of the what, and never getting to the why. What and why aren’t exactly ignored, but they’re kinda loremipsumed away at the beginning in like 5 minutes and never revisited.
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Fascinating thing is, this is 100% rational. The main thing bureaucrats solve for is risk management. If you know the mechanism by which you’re going to attempt to do something, you’ve already figured out the risk profile, and upside and downside, etc.
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The main thing bureaucracies do is cap the upside, accepting a maximal possible outcome value, in order to contain the downside.
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It’s astounding how many sources of money/power that seek to make an impact are willing to make this exchange sacrifice trade off (cap the upside to contain downside via mechanism design)
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In a way it’s wise, because it’s solving for mediocre survivability rather than a single Hail Mary. Pournelle’s Iron Law of bureaucracy as design spec rather than emergent bug. The alternative is what we might call “romantic institutionalism”, a sort of X-or-bust mission design.
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An episode of Yes, Prime Minister, The Bishop’s Gambit (about a bishop appointment) captures this dynamic very well.
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Romantic institutionalism otoh, which goes what —> why —> how, is seen most often and most effectively in sociopathic cult orgs. The what and why are very very clear and make up for a shit ton of chaos in the how. Often though the stated and actual what/why are miles apart
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If stated what/why = actual what/why and the leaders are not in some sort of denial about their real motives (cf: tyranny of structurelessnes) you get an interesting stress test of the “reducibility to praxis” of the governing missionary ideology.
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Such cases are very rare and most fail the test, but in a good way and for the right reason: the ideology is not reducible to praxis (note deliberate distinction from reducibility to *practice*) for reasons like incoherence, utopianism etc.
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The praxis-practice gap is the medium-message gap. The reason not to address how before what/why is medium-message concordance. Most missions worth pursuing require a degree of innovation in medium. So locking in how while what/why are loreipsummed short-circuits co-evolution
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This co-evolution translates to a very specific constraint on the “how” — it specifies what pattern of risk to take on and why. So it short-circuits the default process of picking from off the shelf design patterns on the basis of what fits your psyche rather than the problem.
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Resetting a bureaucracy that has already locked on to its risk preferences is very hard. But at a founding moment, you have a lot of leeway to set defaults in a place principals are not used to, and force mechanism design to a new corner of risk space, innovating if necessary.
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Resets require an external shock proportionate to the inertial mass of the processes already locked on to old risk profile. Aka a Trump-like shock (or natural disaster or radical technical idea etc)
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Note that even apparently high-risk orgs with an aggressive posture can be very risk averse on particular fronts, with process inertia there (a tell: surprisingly incompetent people in high-paid roles in otherwise competent orgs) and strongly resist shifting risk exposure there
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And surprisingly, this is not restricted to big orgs. Orgs as small as 4-5 people show this pattern of bureaucratization. It’s not a function of the scaling staircase but the founder mindsets.
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