It seems to me that many bureaucrats are just blindly following a set of rules laid out for them and they are afraid of bending the rules for fear of getting re

It seems to me that many bureaucrats are just blindly following a set of rules laid out for them and they are afraid of bending the rules for fear of getting reprimanded. This reminds me of two things I saw on Hacker News. One was some TED talk which mentioned a hospital janitor who knew when to bend the rules when cleaning around grieving relatives. The other item was some study that demonstrated that if experts were to follow a set of instructions for a task that they themselves wrote, then they would fail at that task.