5 ms·

Bureaucracy as Active Ingredient

71 points by elvinyung 8y ago

bjelkeman-again 8y ago
To me bureaucracy is more about it being someone’s job to follow the rules and make sure they really are followed. And then you have someone else who makes sure the rules cover every option. And as you may have experienced, there are always cases that don’t fit the rules perfectly, so the bureaucracy keeps getting more complex. It is a rabbit hole, unless you deliberately step in and simplify the rules regularly.
- AstralStorm 8y ago
  First and foremost, if you go full Taylorism, you're supposed to verify the results of adding and keeping any given rule in a scientific way. Defect rates, delays, costs, adherence rates, and regularly sample what happens when you remove a rule if it has costs (they almost always do). Company bureaucracies skip this part as matter of course. Often the adherence parts or existence of workarounds.
- AmericanChopper 8y ago
  I’ve always seen bureaucracies as process design for people that are bad at process design. I work in a very compliance heavy environment, and we run an “agile” team that ships as often as 10 times a day. We have easy audits and no compliance issues because we invested in good process design. A company we’re quite close with has the same compliance requirements, and their shipping process involves printing, signing, scanning and filing excel sheets. It’s not like we’re vastly better at our jobs than they are, we just designed far better processes.
  - lifeisstillgood 8y ago
    Can you indicate what industry ? Or even what level of process (if it's just auto checking we have filled in the right sections on form 1, or more complex?)
    - AmericanChopper 8y ago
      For us, PCI with a multi-billion transaction volume, SOC 2 and ISO27k.
guelo 8y ago
I think of bureaucracies similarly to software. I've seen many legacy code bases that started out simple but as they add features and identify more and more edge cases programmers start adding abstractions and config files and processes and it becomes increasingly complex and difficult to modify and nobody fully comprehends the whole system or how to fix it. I imagine it's the same thing with organizational processes.
- userbinator 8y ago
  The bureaucracy in codebases often mirrors the same of the company in which they were developed, or in some cases the general culture of the programming language itself (prominent examples being Java and C#.) The most horrifically indirect code I've seen comes from large enterprise software, where something that is actually quite simple takes inordinate amounts of code to accomplish; on the other hand, code written by and maintained by only one or two individuals rarely accumulates such accidental complexity.
  - Sniffnoy 8y ago
    See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
zakum1 8y ago
Isn’t the answer that we are moving towards decentralised / self sovereign platforms with more creative ways to transfer value that naturally evolve the right economics? The irony is that bitcoin, the pioneer, confirms your hypothesis because it relies on a form of intentional waste (POW) to disincentivise bad behaviour. PoW is the new bureaucracy. I do think we will find better ways, and decentralisation is the natural outcome.
- elvinyung 8y ago
  I emphatically do not think that decentralization is the natural outcome, nor that it's optimal. On this topic I would recommend one of Scott's most well-known essays, Meditations on Moloch [1]. The meat of it is this: > …in some competition optimizing for X, the opportunity arises to throw some other value under the bus for improved X. Those who take it prosper. Those who don’t take it die out. Eventually, everyone’s relative status is about the same as before, but everyone’s absolute status is worse than before. The process continues until all other values that can be traded off have been – in other words, until human ingenuity cannot possibly figure out a way to make things any worse. If top-town authoritarianism is at one extreme of the spectrum, then completely decentralized systems is the other undesirable extreme, equally bad if not worse: if there is no regulation, then there is no strong coordination, and a race-to-the-bottom situation ensues (in optimizing for X). If everyone is acting game-theoretically optimally, then anyone who tries to improve the situation gets eliminated. It might be locally optimal, but it's highly unlikely to be globally optimal. Decentralization means being a slave to no one, which means being a slave to the incentive system, which means being a slave to everyone else. But I would also encourage thinking of it not as a dualism, a strict choice between bureaucracy and blockchains, but as a spectrum instead. This means that there's an entire world of valid choices in between. I would very much argue that the optimum can be found just by moving closer to the middle. [1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
  - forkerenok 8y ago
    Thanks for sharing this. My thought here is that improving situation doesn't have to happen in the game. One can step out of the game and offer a new one. I.e. the quoted judgement about decentralised systems is not as grave if you don't look at them as closed systems.
magnusss 8y ago
As the manager of an IT organization, I explicitly use delay as a way to measure need. I usually sit on a purchase request until the requestor (sometime later) asks me, "Hey, what's up with that convenient but not essential thing I ordered last week?" Once I know they really need it enough to ask twice I will consider approving it.
- AstralStorm 8y ago
  And then there are two reasons and you failed to discern which it is. Either: 1) thing is not essential, you saved the cost 2) a workaround that is inconvenient or costly exists, compare costs 3) you just caused an opportunity cost In other words, you're breaking the process. Unless you're a process engineer and track both causes and results diligently you should not do that. Ever.
  - magnusss 8y ago
    Excellent analysis! I would modify #2 slightly, as a workaround might also be convenient and cheap. Obviously one should use common sense to avoid adverse outcomes. Inexpensive productivity tools get approved more quickly, whereas upgrades to perfectly fine but previous generation laptops may take a week or so :-).
    - AstralStorm 8y ago
      Often if the workaround is convenient and cheap and know of it, they won't bother calling support. Then the role of some person should be to gather such tacit knowledge and convert it into a usable and transmittable form. Now if they do not know about one, they probably should be informed. :)
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  I'll do this with support, if I respond too quickly then the issue becomes a conversation and the customer will become lazy. Adding a little delay forces them to think for themselves a bit more.
temp-dude-87844 8y ago
The author's musings about this are good fun but they struggle to make a coherent point that delivers deep insight. In this post, he considers the points that commenters raised and tiptoes around the possibility that maybe some bureaucratic rituals are a filter to screen the petitioners by desperation, but he doesn't talk about the possibility that such structures may have evolved incrementally to optimize for maximum ass-covering and the implications thereof. To him, efficiency (of filtering customers) is a sufficient explanation, which is odd considering his complaints about bureaucracy's inefficiencies before and after. So then he raises the archetypal story of the DMV. For being the primary identity providers of the US populace, the DMVs of US states are actually rather remarkable. I guess the seemingly arbitrary progression of ticket numbers in cavernous waiting rooms is valid annoyance, but watermarked cards being mailed out to thousands of people just a few business days after collecting their info is pretty good, and then there's more vehicles than that. Bureaucracy gets a bad rap, but it's worth applying the "I could've built that" test for them the same way it's trendy to critique valuable companies that are "just a chat app". If you had to credential 35 million people and 39 million vehicles a year, how would you do it? Would you codify a few things, and hire rockstars who can think on their feet? How soon would you start making rules about the blatantness of invalid forms, or unpaid fees, or how many people would you have to catch selling favors before you re-examine the process? Deep bureaucracies are often the emergent result when your process has been burned by costly customers (in time, money, effort) or rogue employees (corruption, graft, espionage) too many times. They are systems where each and every decision maker can always defer to the Process as an explanation for why someone can't have something and the Process is sacred because "it's always been that way", even if it changes, and where each and every fulfiller is powerless to truly make a meaningful exception, except when that feature was already built in.
- repsilat 8y ago
  > The author's musings ... struggle to make a coherent point... > So then he raises the archetypal story of the DMV Maybe read it again? The author raises a coherent hypothesis, then questions it as a widely explanatory principle, using the DMV explicitly and intentionally as an example of bureaucratic inefficiency that it describes poorly.
- 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
solatic 8y ago
Author makes the inadvertent case for insurance companies to buy pharmaceutical companies. The marginal cost of production of any medication is virtually nil, the costs are nearly entirely due to R&D. If the treatment costs the insurance company $10,000 then the insurance company has an incentive to provide poor service, but if the treatment costs the insurance company pennies, then there is no need for such bureaucracy to incentivize patients to choose cheaper drugs. Indeed, purchasing the pharmaceutical companies would allow insurance companies to cut out unnecessary levels of administration and their associated costs, thus boosting profits. "Orgs have an incentive not to respond yes to every request they get" - not true. Orgs have an incentive to reduce the cost of saying yes, but saying yes is an important part of providing good customer service, keeping repeat business, and building a brand that enables bigger growth. Orgs that lose sight of this, deserve to be eaten by their competitors.
- vinceguidry 8y ago
  Nothing about vertical integration of those two industries would solve that problem. Paying out millions to billions to own drugs isn't going to make their unit economics any better. The $10,000 drug isn't going to magically only cost $100 just because it got bought by an insurance company. In fact it'll probably cost more, because the transaction costs involved in buying the drug will have to get added onto the R&D cost of developing the drug, which is the reason it costs $10,000 in the first place. It's also wrong to assume that just because a company gets acquired, that there's going to be 'unnecessary levels of administration and other associated costs' that are just begging for the ax. Pharma companies have finance people too that can provide that kind of oversight and recommendations. The market for drugs is complicated by two factors. First is that people who need drugs generally can't get that need met by any other product / service. So there's an incentive for price creep. Second is the patent system which forces companies to grab as much cash as they can until the patent expires. If longer patents were granted, or the patent system were more sane in that the patent period doesn't begin until after the drug is able to be made available to the market, then the costs of developing drugs would be a lot more legible, and therefore amortizable.
  - jessaustin 8y ago
xg15 8y ago
I don't really understand the author's (and some of the commenters') assumption that making a bureaucracy unpleasant and inefficient is a deliberate decision. Certainly, once a bureaucracy got to that point, it might have certain benefits, but I don't see how that implies there was a conscious strategy before.
bbcbasic 8y ago
Proof of work!!!!!!!!¡!!!!!!!
motohagiography 8y ago
Always like to see SSC here. Unbelievably, the medication example the author uses is a system I have direct experience with. It is a group whose job it is to make the decision of whether insurance covers a drug that a doctor has prescribed. The triage is more sophisticated than a queue management ritual, but also has elements of it in it. Some insurer programs require that the patient be declined by another one before paying for the prescription, so the doctors fill out hopeless requests because they need the rejection letter to achieve their outcome. This fills the decision queues, and everyone experiences the lag. Consider doctors handwriting as a next order CV problem, and then think about the attitude of the user demographic who doesn't feel obligated to be clear about their intentions - now design a digital product for them. Bureaucracy in real life is a kind of cluster-governance, where nobody serves each other, and everyone presumes everyone else is coming to them to be regulated. Further, they really do think their job is to avoid obligations to others unless they are somehow mandated to have one. I can say that agile development methods are disrupting bureaucracy in a big way. You don't see it, but every online license renewal and filing system wipes out layers of bureaucracy. The systems take years to develop because the personal/business relationships that made those systems work need to be identified and unraveled before you implement them in code. I would argue you don't understand stakeholder management unless you have spent time in a bureaucracy, and the people who do succeed at it in the private sector often do so as the result of both luck and negative anti-patterns. I saw how the internet changed government almost 20 years ago, and can say that cloud and microservices are now also revolutionary. Tech is an expression of how its users want to relate, and in this way it's culture. When we impose tech on institutions, it realigns them to organize around the relational patterns in the tech. Bureaucracy is an active ingredient, and the tech we develop changes it. Want a better DMV? Build one.
- jaredhansen 8y ago
  >I saw how the internet changed government almost 20 years ago, and can say that cloud and microservices are now also revolutionary. Please elaborate. I would be very interested to hear more about this from your perspective. Thanks!
  - 8y ago
draw_down 8y ago
Well, it is worth being clear about why the drug costs $10,000 in the first place.

71 points by elvinyung 8y ago

To me bureaucracy is more about it being someone’s job to follow the rules and make sure they really are followed. And then you have someone else who makes sure the rules cover every option. And as you may have experienced, there are always cases that don’t fit the rules perfectly, so the bureaucracy keeps getting more complex. It is a rabbit hole, unless you deliberately step in and simplify the rules regularly.

AstralStorm 8y ago
First and foremost, if you go full Taylorism, you're supposed to verify the results of adding and keeping any given rule in a scientific way. Defect rates, delays, costs, adherence rates, and regularly sample what happens when you remove a rule if it has costs (they almost always do). Company bureaucracies skip this part as matter of course. Often the adherence parts or existence of workarounds.
AmericanChopper 8y ago
I’ve always seen bureaucracies as process design for people that are bad at process design. I work in a very compliance heavy environment, and we run an “agile” team that ships as often as 10 times a day. We have easy audits and no compliance issues because we invested in good process design. A company we’re quite close with has the same compliance requirements, and their shipping process involves printing, signing, scanning and filing excel sheets. It’s not like we’re vastly better at our jobs than they are, we just designed far better processes.
- lifeisstillgood 8y ago
  Can you indicate what industry ? Or even what level of process (if it's just auto checking we have filled in the right sections on form 1, or more complex?)
  - AmericanChopper 8y ago
    For us, PCI with a multi-billion transaction volume, SOC 2 and ISO27k.

guelo 8y ago

I think of bureaucracies similarly to software. I've seen many legacy code bases that started out simple but as they add features and identify more and more edge cases programmers start adding abstractions and config files and processes and it becomes increasingly complex and difficult to modify and nobody fully comprehends the whole system or how to fix it. I imagine it's the same thing with organizational processes.

userbinator 8y ago
The bureaucracy in codebases often mirrors the same of the company in which they were developed, or in some cases the general culture of the programming language itself (prominent examples being Java and C#.) The most horrifically indirect code I've seen comes from large enterprise software, where something that is actually quite simple takes inordinate amounts of code to accomplish; on the other hand, code written by and maintained by only one or two individuals rarely accumulates such accidental complexity.
- Sniffnoy 8y ago
  See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

zakum1 8y ago

Isn’t the answer that we are moving towards decentralised / self sovereign platforms with more creative ways to transfer value that naturally evolve the right economics? The irony is that bitcoin, the pioneer, confirms your hypothesis because it relies on a form of intentional waste (POW) to disincentivise bad behaviour. PoW is the new bureaucracy. I do think we will find better ways, and decentralisation is the natural outcome.

elvinyung 8y ago
I emphatically do not think that decentralization is the natural outcome, nor that it's optimal. On this topic I would recommend one of Scott's most well-known essays, Meditations on Moloch [1]. The meat of it is this: > …in some competition optimizing for X, the opportunity arises to throw some other value under the bus for improved X. Those who take it prosper. Those who don’t take it die out. Eventually, everyone’s relative status is about the same as before, but everyone’s absolute status is worse than before. The process continues until all other values that can be traded off have been – in other words, until human ingenuity cannot possibly figure out a way to make things any worse. If top-town authoritarianism is at one extreme of the spectrum, then completely decentralized systems is the other undesirable extreme, equally bad if not worse: if there is no regulation, then there is no strong coordination, and a race-to-the-bottom situation ensues (in optimizing for X). If everyone is acting game-theoretically optimally, then anyone who tries to improve the situation gets eliminated. It might be locally optimal, but it's highly unlikely to be globally optimal. Decentralization means being a slave to no one, which means being a slave to the incentive system, which means being a slave to everyone else. But I would also encourage thinking of it not as a dualism, a strict choice between bureaucracy and blockchains, but as a spectrum instead. This means that there's an entire world of valid choices in between. I would very much argue that the optimum can be found just by moving closer to the middle. [1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
- forkerenok 8y ago
  Thanks for sharing this. My thought here is that improving situation doesn't have to happen in the game. One can step out of the game and offer a new one. I.e. the quoted judgement about decentralised systems is not as grave if you don't look at them as closed systems.

magnusss 8y ago

As the manager of an IT organization, I explicitly use delay as a way to measure need. I usually sit on a purchase request until the requestor (sometime later) asks me, "Hey, what's up with that convenient but not essential thing I ordered last week?" Once I know they really need it enough to ask twice I will consider approving it.

AstralStorm 8y ago
And then there are two reasons and you failed to discern which it is. Either: 1) thing is not essential, you saved the cost 2) a workaround that is inconvenient or costly exists, compare costs 3) you just caused an opportunity cost In other words, you're breaking the process. Unless you're a process engineer and track both causes and results diligently you should not do that. Ever.
- magnusss 8y ago
  Excellent analysis! I would modify #2 slightly, as a workaround might also be convenient and cheap. Obviously one should use common sense to avoid adverse outcomes. Inexpensive productivity tools get approved more quickly, whereas upgrades to perfectly fine but previous generation laptops may take a week or so :-).
  - AstralStorm 8y ago
    Often if the workaround is convenient and cheap and know of it, they won't bother calling support. Then the role of some person should be to gather such tacit knowledge and convert it into a usable and transmittable form. Now if they do not know about one, they probably should be informed. :)
tonyedgecombe 8y ago
I'll do this with support, if I respond too quickly then the issue becomes a conversation and the customer will become lazy. Adding a little delay forces them to think for themselves a bit more.

temp-dude-87844 8y ago

The author's musings about this are good fun but they struggle to make a coherent point that delivers deep insight. In this post, he considers the points that commenters raised and tiptoes around the possibility that maybe some bureaucratic rituals are a filter to screen the petitioners by desperation, but he doesn't talk about the possibility that such structures may have evolved incrementally to optimize for maximum ass-covering and the implications thereof. To him, efficiency (of filtering customers) is a sufficient explanation, which is odd considering his complaints about bureaucracy's inefficiencies before and after. So then he raises the archetypal story of the DMV. For being the primary identity providers of the US populace, the DMVs of US states are actually rather remarkable. I guess the seemingly arbitrary progression of ticket numbers in cavernous waiting rooms is valid annoyance, but watermarked cards being mailed out to thousands of people just a few business days after collecting their info is pretty good, and then there's more vehicles than that. Bureaucracy gets a bad rap, but it's worth applying the "I could've built that" test for them the same way it's trendy to critique valuable companies that are "just a chat app". If you had to credential 35 million people and 39 million vehicles a year, how would you do it? Would you codify a few things, and hire rockstars who can think on their feet? How soon would you start making rules about the blatantness of invalid forms, or unpaid fees, or how many people would you have to catch selling favors before you re-examine the process? Deep bureaucracies are often the emergent result when your process has been burned by costly customers (in time, money, effort) or rogue employees (corruption, graft, espionage) too many times. They are systems where each and every decision maker can always defer to the Process as an explanation for why someone can't have something and the Process is sacred because "it's always been that way", even if it changes, and where each and every fulfiller is powerless to truly make a meaningful exception, except when that feature was already built in.

repsilat 8y ago
> The author's musings ... struggle to make a coherent point... > So then he raises the archetypal story of the DMV Maybe read it again? The author raises a coherent hypothesis, then questions it as a widely explanatory principle, using the DMV explicitly and intentionally as an example of bureaucratic inefficiency that it describes poorly.
8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

solatic 8y ago

Author makes the inadvertent case for insurance companies to buy pharmaceutical companies. The marginal cost of production of any medication is virtually nil, the costs are nearly entirely due to R&D. If the treatment costs the insurance company $10,000 then the insurance company has an incentive to provide poor service, but if the treatment costs the insurance company pennies, then there is no need for such bureaucracy to incentivize patients to choose cheaper drugs. Indeed, purchasing the pharmaceutical companies would allow insurance companies to cut out unnecessary levels of administration and their associated costs, thus boosting profits. "Orgs have an incentive not to respond yes to every request they get" - not true. Orgs have an incentive to reduce the cost of saying yes, but saying yes is an important part of providing good customer service, keeping repeat business, and building a brand that enables bigger growth. Orgs that lose sight of this, deserve to be eaten by their competitors.

vinceguidry 8y ago
Nothing about vertical integration of those two industries would solve that problem. Paying out millions to billions to own drugs isn't going to make their unit economics any better. The $10,000 drug isn't going to magically only cost $100 just because it got bought by an insurance company. In fact it'll probably cost more, because the transaction costs involved in buying the drug will have to get added onto the R&D cost of developing the drug, which is the reason it costs $10,000 in the first place. It's also wrong to assume that just because a company gets acquired, that there's going to be 'unnecessary levels of administration and other associated costs' that are just begging for the ax. Pharma companies have finance people too that can provide that kind of oversight and recommendations. The market for drugs is complicated by two factors. First is that people who need drugs generally can't get that need met by any other product / service. So there's an incentive for price creep. Second is the patent system which forces companies to grab as much cash as they can until the patent expires. If longer patents were granted, or the patent system were more sane in that the patent period doesn't begin until after the drug is able to be made available to the market, then the costs of developing drugs would be a lot more legible, and therefore amortizable.
- jessaustin 8y ago

xg15 8y ago

I don't really understand the author's (and some of the commenters') assumption that making a bureaucracy unpleasant and inefficient is a deliberate decision. Certainly, once a bureaucracy got to that point, it might have certain benefits, but I don't see how that implies there was a conscious strategy before.

bbcbasic 8y ago

Proof of work!!!!!!!!¡!!!!!!!

motohagiography 8y ago

Always like to see SSC here. Unbelievably, the medication example the author uses is a system I have direct experience with. It is a group whose job it is to make the decision of whether insurance covers a drug that a doctor has prescribed. The triage is more sophisticated than a queue management ritual, but also has elements of it in it. Some insurer programs require that the patient be declined by another one before paying for the prescription, so the doctors fill out hopeless requests because they need the rejection letter to achieve their outcome. This fills the decision queues, and everyone experiences the lag. Consider doctors handwriting as a next order CV problem, and then think about the attitude of the user demographic who doesn't feel obligated to be clear about their intentions - now design a digital product for them. Bureaucracy in real life is a kind of cluster-governance, where nobody serves each other, and everyone presumes everyone else is coming to them to be regulated. Further, they really do think their job is to avoid obligations to others unless they are somehow mandated to have one. I can say that agile development methods are disrupting bureaucracy in a big way. You don't see it, but every online license renewal and filing system wipes out layers of bureaucracy. The systems take years to develop because the personal/business relationships that made those systems work need to be identified and unraveled before you implement them in code. I would argue you don't understand stakeholder management unless you have spent time in a bureaucracy, and the people who do succeed at it in the private sector often do so as the result of both luck and negative anti-patterns. I saw how the internet changed government almost 20 years ago, and can say that cloud and microservices are now also revolutionary. Tech is an expression of how its users want to relate, and in this way it's culture. When we impose tech on institutions, it realigns them to organize around the relational patterns in the tech. Bureaucracy is an active ingredient, and the tech we develop changes it. Want a better DMV? Build one.

jaredhansen 8y ago
>I saw how the internet changed government almost 20 years ago, and can say that cloud and microservices are now also revolutionary. Please elaborate. I would be very interested to hear more about this from your perspective. Thanks!
- 8y ago

draw_down 8y ago

Well, it is worth being clear about why the drug costs $10,000 in the first place.