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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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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Yes, I’m subtweeting an anonymized composite of a dozen client orgs from the past decade
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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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End of conversation
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Interesting. What are some tips/advice for maximizing one’s chances of maintaining how-why coherence?
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