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.
-
-
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.
Show this thread -
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)
Show this thread -
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
Show this thread -
Yes, I’m subtweeting an anonymized composite of a dozen client orgs from the past decade
Show this thread -
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.
Show this thread
End of conversation
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.