I really like this thought from Lars Bjork, CEO of QlikTech, in an interview in the NY Times: Love order, hate bureaucracy, he says … “Order is where you put a process into place because you want to scale the business to a different level. Bureaucracy is where nobody understands why you do it.”
I’m constantly intrigued at how systems take on a life of their own. Everybody witnesses it. Everyone agrees it happens. What starts out, innocently enough, as a way of checking something soon grows its own mandate. It invades other areas. Then it gets a righteous title or attaches itself to a critical area (compliance, operations, efficiency, policy, framework etc), spawns a budget, a project team and a management structure, and suddenly it’s part of the war on chaos. It stalks the organisation gathering strength and credibility with every meeting.
Before long it’s part of the sign-off, and once legal and HR take it under their wing, it’s part of the furniture. The sign-off gets longer, harder, more involved.
‘How’ overtakes ‘what’ and ‘why’. The pursuit of the paperwork becomes a self-appointed Holy Grail, to the point where something’s not right if it doesn’t have the ever-increasing stamps and signatures. The business becomes utterly accountable to, and limited by, the bureaucracy. And the fact that no-one really understands what happens, why it happens, where it leads, why it’s needed, who authorised it, what difference it makes or why it was even devised only seems to add to its mystique.
Next time you go to a meeting and someone suggests something, check for two pieces of feedback: “We can’t” and “We’ll need to …”. Chances are, that’s bureaucracy making its presence felt.
Which is why I’m so drawn to Bjork’s observation. Success stems from having and finding ways to get to where the business needs to go. Those are true processes. Anything else is not. Bureaucracy is cipher for barrier.
And it’s about recognising too, as Bjork observes, that systems have an inherent tendency to become more complex. The more we do something, it seems, the more we try and factor in every eventuality, every contingency, everyone … and things take on an internal logic that is utterly baffling and yet strangely compelling and reassuring, all at the same time.
We structure bureaucracy on assumptions backfilled by layers of history – ‘it must be this way, it needs to say this, it requires five of these’ – when we should of course structure everything the business does on questions. One in particular – Does this (process) get us to there (goal) as quickly and simply as it can?
That’s the chase. Cut to that.
