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I think it's a consequence of taking away individual judgement and becoming, it seems, terrified of letting a person make a decision, because sometimes they're

• stinkytaco 9y ago
  I'm only speculating, but I think social media has only exacerbated this problem. Now every screw-up an employee makes (or a teacher, or an administrator, or whatever) is magnified times ten to everyone on the aggrieved party's Facebook feed. Have a teacher that said something a parent took offense to? An employee who misplaced an item you had ordered? An employee can always fall back on the policy and push the blame to the institution and the institution can say "we'll review our policies". Funny thing is that as a bureaucrat, coming up with policies is my job. It tends to improve overall outcomes and satisfaction, but the same outliers described above are also magnified ten-fold (this policy is stupid because ...).
  • ashark 9y ago
    My best guess is that it's the result of 20-30 years of never accepting "shit happens, we looked and everything seems basically fine, we're not changing anything" as an answer when something bad happens and someone asks "so what are you doing to make sure this doesn't happen again?"—even when that answer's actually appropriate. The consequences are so bad if you make the do-nothing call and get it wrong (or are just unlucky) that everyone does a whole bunch of stuff to ensure they can say "look at all the things I did!" if lightning strikes twice (or if they were simply wrong and something did need to be done, but it wasn't clear until a pattern emerged) Instead we always freak out and add a bunch of new policies/guidelines, some more mandatory educational videos or classes, and maybe bring down the hammer on some people as well. [EDIT] in fact it may be yet another symptom of post-Nixon-era cynicism. We expect institutions to lie to us about everything (which, to be fair, they often do and often have), so we (rather, the media) dig into any problem expecting criminality and neglect and generally bad behavior (and a great story!), so institutions have to go nuts to make sure it never looks like there's anything there worth reporting as maybe-sort-of-kind-of any of those bad things.
    • turbulents 9y ago
      The FAA, NTSB, and airlines have made air travel incredibly safe over the years by operating the way you described.
      • CaptSpify 9y ago
        I am by no means an expert on this subject so correct me if I'm wrong but.... The exception that I've noticed from the airline-industry, is that they actually want to solve problems systemically and don't care who has to take the blame. For something to go wrong, multiple failures have to happen, and there's not a lot of blame put on individuals, as much as "the process". In most other organizations, IME, fixing "the process" is expensive. It takes time, and effort, and it's quicker and easier to blame "those idiots in IT/accounting/HR/etc". Most of those types of organizations don't actually want to solve problems, they just want the problem to go away. So they end up choosing the easier option, rather than dealing with the problem systematically. /bitter rant
        • jfoutz 9y ago
          NTSB, i think, no one takes the blame. For example, if the error is something like "Mechanic didn't tighten bolt to appropriate torque." So, what's wrong? maybe they forgot and need a checklist item? Maybe the reading on the wrench should be recorded in the log? should there be a second person that verifies? They know they ask a lot of people, and it has to be right, every time. People get sick, tired, distracted, whatever. we're people. People are the least reliable part of the system. I think blame only falls to a person when they've lied. Falsified a log, claimed to do something they didn't etc.
          • pbecotte 9y ago
            That's the thing. In the Air Force (at least)- there is no thought of cost/benefit analysis. A single machine fails once because a bolt wasn't torqued and causes $5000 of damage ... So they add the checklist item, and the second person, and an extra training item, and a log record that has to be maintained. The list of special rules and required documentation only ever gets longer. Eventually, you spend all your time on the checklists and maintaining the documentation, and none on actually doing whatever procedure you were originally messing with that bolt for.
• tajen 9y ago
  > Organizations are afraid of individuals deciding things, and individuals are eager to push their decisions onto a "process" or "policy" But! but we're in IT and the Agile Manifesto is the exact reaction to that! We have a living proof that "another way" is possible. Hire champions and trust them on the task, it makes them more enterprising and crafters and makes them deliver systematic higher quality. Remember how IBM's IT used to be: Pathetic chain of specification-driven documents that "decision-makers" couldn't possibly read. Let's just say for the moment that the rest of the industries haven't found an "Agile metgodology" that befits them. Let's hope it's just a matter of time before government-sized organizations have an epiphany about how to apply Agile to death-risking processes.
  • mbaha 9y ago
    Looking at this issue more broadly, I definitely agree that non-IT industries need to take into account Agile methodology to improve their results. I've been looking for the reason why IT has come up with Agile before anyone else (I don't consider Lean Industrial Management as Agile whatsoever) and I simply think it's because the first industry with so much information in it (it's in the title even...). Now that other industries have to orchestrate huge processes with huge amounts of information, I hope they'll take into account what IT brought up to solve this issue instead of taking the "IBM route" further (more policies, more guidelines, more bureaucracy).
    • dragonwriter 9y ago
      > Looking at this issue more broadly, I definitely agree that non-IT industries need to take into account Agile methodology to improve their results. Non-IT industries are often ahead of the “Agile” movement in IT, having adopted Lean methodology and related approaches that actually applying engineering approaches to solve the problem identified, but not actionably addressed, in the Agile Manifesto. Most so-called Agile methodologies (the exceptions mostly being adaptations from Lean methodologies, either in other industries or from the Lean Software Development movement) fail to do this, and Agile has largely become exactly the kind of cargo cult, situation-blind consultant-driven, value-blind nightmare that the Agile Manifesto was a response against.
• nostrademons 9y ago
  I think you're observing Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy, which I guess could be stated pithily as "The goal of every bureaucracy is to become self-sustaining. Those that don't are replaced by those that do": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Iron_Law_of_Bureaucracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Iron_Law_of_Bu... It's interesting that another active comment thread on the HN front page today is about evolutionary game theory & the selfish gene. I'd posit that there's a whole class of "evolutionary systems", subject to the axioms of 1.) large numbers 2.) random variation 3.) selection bias and 4.) competitive pressure. And any such system will always tend toward survival and maintenance of the status quo as its primary imperative, for the simple, tautological reason that those organizations that don't are replaced by those that do. This operates on multiple levels, from the molecule to the gene to the cell to the individual to the firm to the bureaucracy to the society as a whole. Oftentimes, behavior that makes no sense on one level seems obvious if you consider the "actor" to be the level above or below what you're looking at: the gene instead of the individual, or the firm instead of the individual, or the society instead of the firm. In your example, for instance, the primary actor whose survival that the bureaucracy optimizes for isn't the individual: it's the bureaucracy itself. Individuals who serve their own interests instead of the bureaucracy are rejected and fired, as are individuals who serve the other individuals that the bureaucracy supposedly benefits. Why? Because bureaucracies without this incentive structure are replaced by bureaucracies with it. And there actually are plenty of areas within U.S. society where bureaucracies are not the primary actors. The individual is still valued over the firm or bureaucracy within therapy culture, artist communities, fandom, Internet forums, dinner parties, and many other social contexts. But because there is no central bureaucracy or organization to point to, these niches fall off our radar screen; niches where individual humans remain dominant are by definition areas without enough resources to support a bureaucracy. Baumol's cost disease is different, and IMHO a more short-term ailment that's afflicting developed economies as they transition to the information age. This phenomena of growing ever more complex systems on top of individuals is pervasive, and will continue to happen as long as the population keeps growing.
  • taneq 9y ago
    > I think you're observing Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy This sounds like a special case of the more general law of survival of the fittest (where 'fittest' means 'most self-sustaining').
• aerodeck 9y ago
  One extra consideration here is that as power centralizes, the costs of individual mistakes increases.
• breatheoften 9y ago
  A less cynical take on the taking away of individual judgement is that it arises from the need for individuals to be replaceable rather than solely as a means of deflecting blame ... Coastguard ships for example cycle the entire crew every two years. I imagine it must be similar in the navy. There is very little institutional memory retention -- and so the "process" emerges to try to direct all the human cogs as they pass through ...
  • KineticLensman 9y ago
    UK experience here. All military units (including ships) experience staffing ‘churn’ as individuals join and leave for career and other reasons. Some military units are periodically completely reset (e.g. a new ship or a ship that has been extensive refitted), and they then have extensive training regimes to become ready for operations again. The churn then starts again. Some units persist for long periods of time (e.g. a formed air squadron) and do not get ‘reset’ under usual circumstances, although they do have churn. Others (e.g. army formations) have repeating multi-year cycles of training, being ready for ops, and other tasks. The institutional memory is notionally preserved by the instructors in the schools and training centres (as well as documented Standard Operating Procedures, standing orders, etc). New joiners will have undergone standardized training, and although they still have to establish their role (storming, forming, norming, etc) when they join an existing team, they do in principle understand what they are supposed to be doing. In some cases, new joiners bring valuable new knowledge, skills or attitudes, so churn isn’t always bad. Individuals who have joined up for the long term will themselves have cyclic periods of training, with initial trade training followed by time in a unit, then additional specialised training at a school, then more operational tours, etc. Some highly-trained individuals may be embedded in the units themselves (e.g. at a barracks) to provide standardized, decentralised on-the-job training / supervision to newbies who have joined from a military trade school.
    • bluGill 9y ago
      More importantly, ALL military needs to be ready for massive war. If another world war breaks out they need to quickly scale to 100x as many humans. That cannot be done unless everything is easy to teach. Follow a checklist exactly is easy to teach.
• pitt1980 9y ago
  It seems interesting to contrast this with the explanation of the financial crises that decision makers had 'privatized benefits and externalized costs' (I remember hearing it from Nassim Taleb, but there were probably others making the same point) aligning incentives between organizations and the people who make them up is hard