The Bureaucratically Boiled Frog

[jducoeur]

In the context of an organization I'm involved with (not going to say which one -- really isn't relevant), I got into a discussion of some rules that had recently been put in place, that IMO are unnecessary: they're good guidelines, but shouldn't be rules. After making a characteristically impassioned argument against them, this postscript occurred to me. Since it's really quite general, and I haven't posted a good rant on this subject in a few years, it seems worth posting here, with the serial numbers filed off.

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To use a metaphor that had never occurred to me before now (but which I will probably use going forward): bureaucracy is like climate change.

Each new rule is, in and of itself, tiny and tolerable, and there's a natural reaction of, "why are you objecting so hard to this?" The problem is that, once put in place and well-established, it tends to be nearly impossible to dislodge those rules: weird though it may seem, it is much, much easier, in every organization I've ever observed, to add rules than to remove them. Adding them tends to be fairly easy; trying to remove them later gets catastrophized, and requires extreme efforts -- many people go to great lengths to rationalize why they are deathly important once they're entrenched.

The result is that they build up in the "atmosphere" of the organization, step by step over the course of years. It's very incremental, but over the span of time, organizations that start out vibrant, cooperative and ground-up inevitably turn slow, stodgy, and top-down, buried under the weight of their own processes.

(None of this is unique to our situation, BTW. These observations were originally formulated from the various clubs and activities I'm involved with, but turn out to apply almost identically to companies, governments, and all other organizations past a certain size. Far as I can tell, any group large enough that consensus is impossible winds up prone to this effect.)

In my experience, this process is inevitable in the long run, but the collective attitude affects how fast it happens. If you can foster a general outlook of "every inflexible rule must be viewed with an acid eye, and must fight for its life", you can slow it down a good deal. That preserves organizational health and vigor for longer, and generally keeps things more fun.

Hence, the passion displayed above -- I like X a lot, and want to keep liking it for as long as possible.

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Please take this as food for thought, any time that you are in a position of power in an organization. Each rule is small; the collective of them can be crushing. And the more slowly you boil that frog, the longer the organization will tend to remain fun...

Comments

[juan_gandhi]

Good point about the frog. Should I quote Bach? "the only true law is that which leads to freedom"

[mindstalk]

An idea I've had for laws is that they should automatically sunset after something like 20 years, unless explicitly renewed.

[alexxkay]

Alternately, have the law come with an explicit purpose, a metric for measuring whether it is achieving that purpose, and a regular schedule of checks where, if the metric falls too low, the law ends.

[ckd]

Label all the Chesterton's Fences, and write unit tests? Sounds good to me.

[jducoeur]

Mmm -- I like that. At least for organizations that are already used to metrics, that could be a fairly compelling argument. (And crafting good metrics is enough of a pain in the butt that it may give people pause before writing a rule.)

The downside, of course, is that measuring the metric is itself even more overhead, so one shouldn't go too far overboard...

[squirrelitude]

I like that. :-)

At work we use Architecture Decision Records, which are fairly lightweight documents where we describe why a change is being made. Later, when someone wants to change the decision (or some related code), they can look back and see if the context is still relevant.

[jducoeur]

Yeah, I've been having discussions at work about the optimal use of ADRs. (And how not to turn them into excessively heavy bureaucracy themselves.)

Semi-related

[alexxkay]

Siderea had a post a while back (which I can't now find) suggesting only semi-facetiously that for each line on a form, the person filling it out be paid a dollar by the org demanding the info.

Re: Semi-related

[jducoeur]

I've heard sillier ideas, and it casts the problem in an interesting light: the economics of bureaucracy tend to be pretty messed up. There is little disincentive to adding rules -- they tend to benefit the person adding the rule (at least a little), and they don't feel any pain from the small inconvenience that they are imposing on large numbers of people.

[cellio]

That's a good analogy, and probably more broadly accessible than the boiling-frogs analogy I tend to reach for. Thank you.

I was on the laws committee when AEthelmearc was forming and thus needed laws. I had to push hard against the "start with the union of all suggestions" approach; one committee member, I kid you not, had assembled an amalgamation of all other kingdoms' laws and proposed it as a starting point. I and a few others were on the "only what is actually necessary" side -- some of us felt that "one sheet of paper (ok you can use both sides), readable font" was achievable. The then-seneschal had a good idea for keeping laws small that, alas, was rejected: write into the laws that each new law must be accompanied by the removal of another law (of equal mass).

We lost, and then a few reigns in somebody went wild and things got ridiculous, and of course things almost never get removed. And the corporation has gotten more and more demanding and ridiculous over the years, and too few people are willing to say "but is it necessary? how does it serve us?" to much of anything that comes down from on high. The corporation killed most of the fun for me, but my kingdom and barony were willing partners. So now I do my best to ignore all the BS and just hang out with my friends occasionally (when we're able to hang out with our friends again).

[jducoeur]

I'm still more active than that, but I stay away from formal offices these days (even more than I used to) -- I can't cope with enforcing rules that I disagree with...

[cellio]

I dropped my membership after the BoD crisis, declining to reward a mismanaged and over-reaching corporation with more of my money, and am thus not eligible to provide that kind of volunteer service any more. I figure that's on them.

[jducoeur]

My feelings are somewhat more nuanced -- I think the Society has terrible institutional flaws, but I don't generally hold that against the people in charge. I'm still active enough that I find the membership somewhat worthwhile, if preposterously over-priced, and it helps me maintain a measure of moral high ground when I point out the flaws in the system.