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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Replying to
This isn't even a bureaucracy thing; I'm fairly convinced that "not getting yelled at" is the prime driver of action or inaction in any large organization. The SEC in part changed prosecution tactics because of Congress yelling at them!
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