The sad story of Peanut the Squirrel and Fred the Raccoon has inspired many people to think about the nature of bureaucracy. I’m reminded of a few stories:
When the fire alarm went off at Como Park High School in Minnesota in 2013 , a 14-year-old girl was rousted out of the swimming pool–dripping wet and wearing only a swimsuit–and was told to go stand outside where the temperature was sub-zero and the wind chill made it much worse. Then, she was not allowed to take refuge in one of the many cars in the parking lot because of a school policy forbidding students from sitting in a faculty member’s car. As Bookworm noted:
Even the lowest intelligence can figure out that the rule’s purpose is to prevent teachers from engaging sexually with children. The likelihood of a covert sexual contact happening between Kayona and a teacher under the actual circumstances is ludicrous. The faculty cars were in full view of the entire school. There was no chance of illicit sexual congress.
But the whole nature of bureaucratic rules, of course, is to forbid human judgment based on actual context.
Fortunately for Kayona, her fellow students hadn’t had human decency ground out of them by rules: “…fellow students, however, demonstrated a grasp of civilized behavior. Students huddled around her and some frigid classmates [sic], giving her a sweatshirt to put around her feet. A teacher coughed up a jacket.” As the children were keeping Kayona alive, the teachers were working their way through the bureaucracy. After a freezing ten minutes, an administrator finally gave permission for the soaking wet, freezing Kayla to sit in a car in full view of everybody.
As Bookworm notes, this sort of thing has become increasingly common. In England in 2009, for example, a man with a broken back lay in 6 inches of water, but paramedics refused to rescue him because they weren’t trained for water rescues. Dozens of similar examples could easily be dredged up.
In Sweden, also in 2013, there was rampant rioting that included the torching of many cars. The government of Sweden didn’t do a very good job of protecting its citizens and their property from this outbreak of barbarism. Government agents did, however, fulfill their duty of issuing parking tickets…to burned-out cars. Link with picture.
The behavior of these bureaucrats is very similar to the behavior of a computer program confronted by a situation for which its designers did not explicitly provide. Sometimes the results will be useless, sometimes they will be humorous, often they will be harmful or outright disastrous.
Here’s an essay written by a Spanish naval official in 1797, on the subject ‘Why do we keep losing to the British and what can we do about it?’ The pathologies that Don Domingo Perez de Grandallana saw in his country’s naval operations are now disturbingly present in many American organizations.
Thoughts from Peter Drucker, the great writer on management and society, on the nature of bureaucracy.
An old SF story, “Dumb Waiter,” by Walter Miller, is very relevant to the subject of mindless and destructive bureaucratic behavior. (Miller is best known for his philosophical/theological novel A Canticle for Leibowitz.)
In the story, cities have become fully automated—municipal services are provided by robots linked to a central computer system. But when war erupted–featuring radiological attacks–some of the population was killed, and the others evacuated the cities. In the city that is the focus of the story, there are no people left, but “Central” and its subunits are working fine, doing what they were programmed to do many years earlier.
While we associate bureaucracy with government, it exists as well int he private sector. In a prior professional life with a Fortune 500 company, there was always the choice when presented with a problem; you could follow procedure and guarantee failure or you could try something new and different and have a 50-50 shot at success. Want to guess which one was the safer option?
I will also add that at the field level said company now hires employees remotely. Local management has no say in the process. It is entirely conducted remotely by HR
Procedure just doesn’t become a tool of conscious expansive tyranny but a refuge, a version of only following orders. The circumstances regarding P’Nut and Fred are not only tragic and heart-rendering they are also ridiculous. Leave aside the raid in the first place, who sends that many people for that period of time?
I’m going to guess that the state government agency received a complaint and middle-tier management thought through the choices. If they didn’t investigate the complaint it would sit on the books, best take it seriously by following procedure. If they were going to investigate a potentially hostile situation, then best follow procedure to the letter and like a SWAT raid send enough people to make sure there was no resistance. The P’Nut did his don’t tread on me, the agency followed antiquated rabies procedures and killed him. Not sure what the reason was for Fred.
Safety in procedure.
Keep in mind procedure can never mirror reality, it is only a written approximation of it. In today’s grievance culture with identity politics it becomes even worse because to grant any discretion at the “customer” level is to invite legal action.
That doesn’t even get into malicious actions of bureaucratic aggrandizement and and the sins petty tyranny.
Btw… I had to renew my license the other month and my experience was great… in and out in 20 minutes including an eye test. Of course I spent a few minutes before arriving in preparation, but the experience was much better than say trying to return a defective item at a store or getting a discount on distressed merchandise.
Mike…”you could follow procedure and guarantee failure or you could try something new and different and have a 50-50 shot at success. Want to guess which one was the safer option?”
In jobs that are measured by results, using a meaningful set of metrics, the try-something-new may actually be safer. In non-measurable jobs, the other way around.
Hiring people without involvement of whoever they are going to report to is terrible policy. Who are these field people in the example?…sales reps, or something else.
On a general level, the awful private-sector bureaucracies to which people are exposed probably help drive a support-bigger-government mindset.
In times past, subsidiarity/decentralization in organizations was substantially enforced by geography and the limitations of transportation and communications (‘the mountains are high and the emperor is far away’)…today, with faster transportation and essentially instantaneous communications, decentralization must be a conscious choice. It is all too easy to centralize things at headquarters, based on thinking about ‘synergies’ and ‘better data’ and ‘more expertise’.
David- I was speaking of my old company Home Depot and a new policy of remote hiring hourly field workers in stores and centers. Note this follows on other policies of degrading linkages and team cultures within stores in favor of external connections; it’s hard to build a team culture when you are shipped new hires. It’s being part of a Dilbert comic
It takes a tremendous amount of energy to keep an ambitious, results-driven and creative culture going within any organization, especially within diverse ethnic and professional cultures. Where it usually works for a period of time is either in high-growth areas in which the energy and cultural attachment can be imported from the environment or it comes from leadership. Organizations without a very strong external focus drift toward stasis, it’s a natural phenomena, organizations are like people in that most prefer a nice consistent and predictable existence.
Organizations and their culture stagnate in parts because functions need to be staffed and managed; the focus of these newly formed units drift from supporting company-wide function to fulfilling their unit function, this is natural since their KPI are unit based. HR is a great example, rather than being version J.P. Morgan’s quote re: lawyers (“Well, I don’t know as I want a lawyer to tell me what I cannot do. I hire him to tell how to do what I want to do”), it instead becomes the unit becomes the bottleneck for strategy, the primary instead of a secondary function. DEI is another example
I know we have discussed in the past Zeynep Ton and her work regarding HD culture. After spending years battling the ossified remnants of that culture at Home Depot, it seems there is far too much intellectual effort (and book contracts and speaking fees) involved in “creating” business cultures rather than understanding the life-span trajectory and how it needs to be maintained. It’s been what 40 years of trying to re-invent business? The more interesting and useful question is not how to build great companies and cultures, but rather how they die.
Mike: “The more interesting and useful question is not how to build great companies and cultures, but rather how they die.’
Recommended reading — Prof Charles Handy’s books often return to his hypothesis of the “Sigmoid Curve”. Essentially, for any venture, there is a tough period of investment, followed for successful ventures by a turn-around and a period of steady growth (the “good times”), which ends with the venture plateauing, and then starting to decline. It describes everything from the Roman Empire to the Catholic Church to US Steel to International Communism.
The implication is that all human organizations have an inevitable life cycle, leading to termination — excessive bureaucracy, excessive overhead, complacency all factor in. It is hard to think of an organization that has beaten that fate. Handy’s suggestion is that organizations should take advantage of the good times to deliberately re-invent themselves and start a new Sigmoid Curve. If the organization fails to do that, someone else will — see Sears, Walmart, Amazon, Temu.
For the individual, the implication is to get out of that successful venture at the right time, and take the risk of joining a growing venture which is close to its turn-around phase.
Gavin – Thanks for the rec. I see both Handy’s Age of Paradox and Age of Unreason. I’ve got the latter one on order and I’ve slotted it in my reading lineup a few weeks down the line
In keeping with the theme of bureaucratic stupidity, nobody does it like the Russians. This is a story I was somehow completely ignorant of until yesterday:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVP_elhMz-A&pp=ygUEVFUtNA%3D%3D
It’s a little long, but hilarious. After all, it’s not you that will be going to Siberia, maybe.
For more concise presentations, search TU-4.
To see bureaucracy at its most extreme, with concomitant results:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVP_elhMz-A
The copy of the B-29 and the ensuing fol-de-rol of top down dictators.
Many who follow the ‘rules’ or ‘policy’ are making the assumption they are not paid to ‘think’, and are allowed or even encouraged to ‘follow directions, even when they seem fully stupid and self-destructive.
Jack Welch had a HR department that ‘hired the best’, and then he carefully fired the ‘lowest performer’ in the expectation it would improve overall results.
He failed to consider that employees all saw what happened, and of course attempted to make themself appear to be a top performer, perhaps at the overall cost to the work at hand. Those who failed to ‘play the game’ of avoiding being on the bottom level, even if evaluated by their boss as a ‘top performer’, paid the price and were ushered out the door. One can be considered a superior ‘leader’ or ‘manager’, yet be shortsighted as to the effects of their pet policy.
Welch is no longer around to defend his methods, but I for one would not willingly hire on with him knowing what I now know. Our group of developers decided to form a team, and we all shared any increases/bonuses, or pay, bringing a lower paid man to equality with those who had much seniority. It made it hard to fire one of us and break up the group. It worked until ‘downsizing’ forced a breakup.
I was happy because I knew my skills were not appreciated, except when something went wrong beyond my control, and then they noticed how well things had been going…
Management based all actions on stock price and analysts expectations of how the company performed. They failed to take into account the customer, and were eventually so ‘lean’ to match a lying competitors’ claim of ‘cost per minute mile’ they became an easy target for takeover. I was thankfully offered a buy out which let me watch from the sidelines as T was eaten by one of their children.
This topic speaks to me on levels you can’t even know.
And anybody who complains about how bad it is in the private sector, let me assure you it’s FAR worse in government.
Deep down the problem is that nobody wants to take responsibility. And why would they? If you take responsibility, you can end up like Daniel Penny or Derek Chauvin. You can’t be blamed, you were following the process/procedure. So if anything goes wrong, it must be the process that needs fixing. Once we get the process perfect, then people will be perfect.
That’s pretty much the logic nowadays.
I was an elected public school board of education trustee for several terms. Coming from private sector, I was always struck how administration handled matters of personnel: The first question always asked was “was policy followed?”…did we get the best results was rarely asked. Judgment isn’t a priority. Process and not outcomes always govern bureaucracies.