What Makes a Bureaucracy Hostile?
An exploration of how bureaucracies go bad.
Welcome!
Hostile Bureaucracy is a platform to explore, understand, and counter ineffective and cumbersome bureaucracies everywhere. Bureaucracy doesn’t have to be a bad thing, but organizations frequently allow bureaucratic systems to take over in a way that is not just unhelpful, but actively harmful to the organization’s goals. In the first edition of Hostile Bureaucracy, we’ll take set out on our journey by exploring how, and why bureaucracies go bad.
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Good Intentions
To start, we should acknowledge an important point upfront. Like people, bureaucracies are not born bad. Every bureaucracy is conceived as a means of organizing people towards a single common purpose. In other words, they start with good intentions. (Whether the bureaucracy’s intended purpose is morally good is another question, but let’s assume for now that the goal is noble.) Humans are capable of incredible things, but we do our best work when we do it together. And to work together, groups of humans need structure. That’s where bureaucracy comes in. A bureaucracy allows us to establish rules, procedures, and systems that ensure an organization stays on track.
Imagine that you and few of your friends want to start a company that builds widgets. The widgets are revolutionary, and you’re certain that they will change people’s lives for the better (and bring in a tidy profit). But making widgets is difficult. It requires precision manufacturing and strict quality standards. Shipping your widgets to worldwide customers isn’t any easier. And what about marketing? How do you convey a consistent message about the quality of your widgets? Not to mention paying taxes, complying with government regulations, and keeping up with payroll.
If you want to deliver a high-quality product, keep your workers happy, and grow your company, then you’re going to need some structure. You and your friends could simply agree that “everyone will do everything”, and that might even work for a while, but what happens when there is a conflict? And conflict is inevitable, as even well-meaning people, with fully aligned goals, are likely to have different opinions on how to reach those goals. For groups of people to combine their efforts in a productive manner, it is necessary for them to first agree on things like task distribution, decision-making authority, communications mechanisms, and desired end-states. In other words, they need a bureaucracy.
Emergence of a Hostile Bureaucracy
So, your company is growing. You’re shipping widgets around the world, your team is working together well, and by all accounts you’re on your way to fantastic success. In general, things are pretty running pretty smoothly. You have tried to keep bureaucracy to a minimum, everyone pitches in wherever needed, and the organization is almost entirely flat. Still, you have found it necessary to implement a few bureaucratic controls. After a manufacturing mix-up led to a batch of flawed widgets, you instituted a quality control process for spot checks on the assembly line. Similarly, you appointed a head of public relations to review external communications in the aftermath of a distasteful social media post by someone on your team. All-in-all though, you’re still relatively nimble.
As the firm grows though, you find that it is harder and harder for everyone on your team to be involved in everything—and you’re no longer sure that makes sense anyway. Individual team members have unique strengths, weaknesses, and proclivities. To ensure that the company’s talent is aligned properly, everyone agrees to institute more specialization. The results are immediate. Quality goes up in almost every part of the business. But, tension seems to be on the rise as well.
As team members specialize, you notice that their goals aren’t quite as aligned as they once were. The engineers are understandably focused on engineering, the product managers on deadlines, and the communications team on public perceptions. New team members who come on as specialists seem particularly parochial—after all, unlike the original team, the new hires haven’t had much exposure to other units. Communication starts to break down. To address the problem, you introduce new meetings and procedures. The word “stakeholder” gets uttered for the first time. But, you’re growing, so it’s worth it.
A few years goes by. You're now the premier manufacturer of widgets in the world. Various competitors have entered the market, but you’ve got the highest quality widgets and the revenue to prove it. You’re also spending all day, every day, in meetings. It’s nearly impossible to keep track of what everyone is doing, and you no longer know each team member by name. And despite incredible growth, the company isn’t without problems. Internal teams are competing for resources and it’s not clear what direction you should take. You institute more meetings to try to improve information flow, but they rarely end in consensus. Your subordinates (long gone are the days of flat organization) are doing the same thing in their units.
One day, one of the new engineers stops you in the hallway and tells you about her idea to update the production line so that you can manufacture widgets more efficiently. It’s bold, and potentially risky, but you immediately see the merit, especially in light of several new competitors eating away at your market share. You ask the engineer when her idea will go into effect, to which she says “it’s still under review with the Manufacturing and Processing Committee.” The what? You didn’t even know that your company had a Manufacturing and Processing Committee.
Looking around, it’s clear that you’re no longer the nimble widget-maker you once were. Everyone you talk to complains about meetings, review processes, and an unbelievable number of emails and Slack messages. There are still things the company does well, but it feels slow and stagnant. Bureaucracy is a regular topic of concern in your daily executive team stand-ups, but despite being “in charge”, no one seems to know how to fix it. Every time you suggest eliminating some bureaucratic process, your team comes back with what seem to be compelling, legitimate reasons to keep the process. You start to wonder who is really in charge—the people, or the bureaucracy itself.
Elements of a Hostile Bureaucracy
The above vignette is oversimplified, but anyone who has worked in a large organization will see familiar elements in it. Bureaucracies have a way of metastasizing in an unpredictable and uncontrolled manner, in part because their components all seem reasonable by themselves. It’s hard to argue with new procedures that are intended to improve quality, increase information flow, or reduce errors. But without the right culture, bureaucracies cease to serve the people working in them, and start to serve themselves. Self-preservation becomes the bureaucracy’s primary purpose, and when confronted with change, they will defend themselves aggressively. In short, they become hostile.
In the course of our investigations, we’ll explore the aspects of a hostile bureaucracy in much more detail. To start out though, let’s outline a few key elements of hostile bureaucracies.
Hostile bureaucracies prioritize systems over people. Even though bureaucracies are created by, and consist of, people, they don’t necessarily respond to people’s needs. Instead of trying to help people achieve their goals, a hostile bureaucracy is principally concerned with the growth and preservation of the systems that define it. It’s strange to think that people (real, living, conscious creatures) can create a bureaucracy (an artificial construct without consciousness), and somehow end up beholden to it. And yet, that’s what organizations see time and time again.
Hostile bureaucracies are divorced from their original purpose. People create bureaucratic systems to help reach their communal goals (creation of a better widget, effective governance of a city, distribution of charitable aid, etc.), but hostile bureaucracies are primarily concerned with their own survival. This does not mean that the organization never achieves its goals (in fact, it’s better for the bureaucracy if at least some goals are met, otherwise the people revolt), but survival will always be the bureaucracy’s primary goal.
In isolation, most rules, policies, and regulations in a hostile bureaucracy seem reasonable. So reasonable in fact that people in the system will vigorously defend them. This goes back to our earlier point that bureaucratic systems are created for worthwhile purposes. It’s not the individual rules that are the problem though, it’s their cascading effect at scale. Every rule may be reasonable by itself, but taken in their totality, the sum of the rules can be overwhelming.
Hostile bureaucracies metastasize without context. One of the more pernicious aspects of a hostile bureaucracy is its tendency to grow. As the people in a system turn over, the organization experiences context loss for each of the bureaucratic systems those people put in place. As a result, newer generations on a team don’t know why the rules exist in the first place, but are nonetheless beholden to them. In this manner, a bureaucracy can grow as each subsequent generation implements new procedures without eliminating old ones.
Incentive systems are mutated in hostile bureaucracies. Although a hostile bureaucracy will take on a life of its own, the people in it still matter. Problematically though, a hostile bureaucracy creates incentives for those people that are aligned with its own perpetuation. The bureaucracy rewards people for playing by its rules, which means that the people who are most invested in the bureaucracy tend to be those that rise to the top.
As we have seen, hostile bureaucracies are distinct from useful bureaucracies because their goals are misaligned with those of the organization. In coming posts, we’ll talk more about individual aspects of a hostile bureaucracy, how to recognize them, and what to do to push for changes.
That’s it for our inaugural post. We hope to see you on the subscriber roll soon. And if any of the above rings true to you, add your voice in the comments section!
What a wonderful introduction! Have you ever read 'bureaucrats and bleeding hearts' by tess lea? An anthropological study of bureaucrats in Australia