Why does bureaucracy grow and grow and grow?
Business consultant Ichak Adizes, in his book The Pursuit of Prime, suggests that the kudzu-like growth of bureaucracy is because bureaucracy is easy.
Form is simple. There is no need to think. We have only to repeat what we are used to doing. Over time, form wins over function because it is emotionally less taxing.
So, according to Adizes, bureaucracy does two things: 1) it removes the need to think and 2) removes the need to feel.
Why remove the need to think and feel? It’s because asking why is more difficult—both intellectually and emotionally—than asking how. When I hear the phrase “This is how we…” an alarm bell goes off in my head. Don’t discount the means and assume the end is all that matters.
My go-to example of this end-means “bureaucracy” in how I use InDesign templates in my proposal workflow. There are obvious benefits to this workflow, of course—I have no desire to build proposals from scratch every time—but templates are, by nature, a bureaucratic instrument. Templates allow us to “repeat what we are used to doing.”
I have found that the bureaucratic nature of templates has its problems. For instance, I often find myself correcting the same error over and over again as I develop proposals, because the error is embedded in the template. We have only to repeat what we are used to doing.
As with many bureaucratic procedures, the use of templates can create additional types of work, like correcting that same pesky error. Why not just open up the original template, locate that error, and correct it? It’s more mentally taxing, of course—add one more thing to the to-do list!—but it’s also emotionally taxing in a curious way. I find that the recognition of a template as a living, evolving document rather than a stable resource can be profoundly disorienting. If I can’t trust my proposal template, what can I trust?!
This is a clear benefit to bureaucracy—it allows us to effectively ignore swaths of our life and not question every last, little thing. Counter to this view, though, is the point that, if left unchecked, bureaucracy will consume everything in its path.
In my last position in the A/E/C industry, I worked with a marketing director who was hell-bent on checking the creep of bureaucracy into the proposal development process. Nearly every proposal and qualifications package was custom-developed, with fresh typefaces and graphics and, often, fresh written content, carefully rewritten from a sizable stock of boilerplate text. We have only to repeat what we are used to doing? That wouldn’t fly. There was no repeating, because the idea of repetition was verboten.
If we want to create quality output and minimize efforts, some level of bureaucracy seems like not such a bad trade-off.
Taylor Coe 