Why bureaucracy is a problem
I’ve become increasingly interested in bureaucracy as I’ve read more about complexity. Weber’s theory of bureaucracy can work where chains of command are clear and cause and effect are linear. But it causes sub-standard services and a rise in failure demand when we try and make tick box or binary approaches work in complex environments. It’s good to see this picked up in the Case for Change from the The independent review of children’s social care in England.
In The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, David Graeber delves into why bureaucracy has flourished under Neo-Liberalism, despite being traditionally associated with the state.
“Bureaucracies public and private appear — for whatever historical reasons — to be organised in such a way as to guarantee that a significant proportion of actors will not be able to perform their tasks as expected.”
The application of neo-liberal management philosophies has not encouraged innovation, it has stifled it. Professionals are constrained in social care environments. At its worst, the dysfunctional system can lead staff to “set impossible standards and then blame individuals for not living up to them.” Bureaucracy becomes the guiding principle for work, in place of the improvement to people’s lives. These new artificial principles can lead to the gamification of work, where bureaucracy gives meaning beyond the true end goal.
“At some point along the way, rules-as-constraining pass over into rules-as-enabling, even if it’s impossible to say exactly where. Freedom, then, really is the tension of the free play of human creativity against the rules it is constantly generating.”
The Iron Law of Liberalism
Graeber coins the Iron Law of Liberalism in the text, where “any market reform, any government initiative intended to reduce red tape and promote market forces will have the ultimate effect of increasing the total number of regulations, the total amount of paperwork, and the total number of bureaucrats the government employs.”
Nowhere is this more obvious than with Brexit, where Europe was seen as the purveyor of red tape. However bureaucracy has flourished since the UK left the EU.
So where do we go from here?
I have just finished ‘The End of Average’ by Todd Rose. I gave it a read after Complex Wales’ excellent post on why the story is the measure.
Rose cites Ergodic Theory as a means of debunking averagarian thinking, which is behind our society’s problematic use of averages. The theory is used to decide when you can make decisions based on averages. This only works when:
- Every member of the group is identical
- Every member of the group will remain the same in future
Using this criteria, it’s clear that one size fits all approaches are designed to fail, as we are all inherently different.
Rose calls for us to move from a place where we’re aggregating data, then analysing it. Instead, we should be doing the reverse — analysing the data to understand the individual data in context, then aggregating it.
This can then free us up to understand what works best for the individual. It helps us to understand how we can work with people so that they can live their best lives. The possibilities of what we can achieve are then almost limitless when we leave the artificial confines of our thinking. As Rose says, “once you free yourself from averagarian thinking, what previously seemed impossible will start to become intuitive, and then obvious.”
