Diamond of Bureaucracy

Management in large organizations with thousands of employees cannot keep track of it all. Still, they desire the 4 C's of Comprehensiveness. 

■ certainty
■ consistency
■ coherence
■ coverage.

Such completeness is not human: only a bureaucracy (or a computer) can regularly act or provide answers with those qualities. So bureaucracies are created. And computerization is added. The result can be toxic in the extreme.

Yet bureaucracies must be created. Avoidance is not an option, unless the organization is very small (e.g. 25 employees or less). Even then, regulations from governmental bureaucracies demand a mirror response that sets up in-house regulations with basic systems and procedures for data collection. None of these Channels serve human feelings or appreciate our frailties.

It is worth noticing (right side of diagram) that the Diamond of Bureaucracy does not touch work — that is why employees find it so interfering and disruptive. Bureaucracy is about energizing (!), controlling and orienting employees in relation to reviewing their work.

The Axis of Bureaucracy

Satisfaction provides the axis and driver for more and ever more bureaucracy. Why?Closed  The experience of dissatisfaction can be so easily (?mindlessly) handled by more staff, more money, more rules, more reporting, more discipline.

Almost daily, governments, in the face of ceaseless criticism and their compulsion to «do something», respond with more bureaucracy: new agencies, new regulation, new procedures, new paperwork, more discipline. In modern societies, crises—like the global financial crisis—typically occur despite pre-existing bureaucracy that could have prevented it. See an example from politics.

Closely allied to the barrier of bureaucracy is the love of re-organization: commonly (but erroneously) attributed to Petronius.

 

 

 

"We trained very hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form into teams we would be re-organized.

"I was to learn later in life that we tried to meet any new situation by reorganizing, and a wonderful method it was for creating the illusion of progress whilst producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization."

But all is not lost: 

► See the Rectangle of Compromise.

Originally posted: 30-Nov-2011