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)
Conversation
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.
1
18
An episode of Yes, Prime Minister, The Bishop’s Gambit (about a bishop appointment) captures this dynamic very well.
1
8
Yes, they’re born bureaucrats too 😆
Quote Tweet
You can say the same thing about many designers and technologists. twitter.com/vgr/status/120…
1
1
4
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
1
1
11
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.
1
4
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.
1
6
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
2
2
9
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.
1
4
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.
1
2
7
Replying to
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
1
2
12
Yes, I’m subtweeting an anonymized composite of a dozen client orgs from the past decade 😆
1
5
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.
1
6
Replying to
‘The Systems Bible’ extends the argument to a general systems vs bureaucracy. Laugh out loud read too 😁
1


