All bureaucrats?

In the “start-up nation”, as in the most ambitious companies and organisations, being called a “bureaucrat” is hardly flattering. Yet the temptation to adopt this way of organising, deliberately or not, is strong. What if we changed it?

Since Max Weber, many sociologists have described bureaucratic systems. In the light of the modern challenges of our open, interconnected societies, and after 18 months of health crisis, let us revisit a few key criteria that shed light on the relevance of certain organisations.

Risk aversion

Unless you live in a large single-storey house, you will not want to replace your washing machine or fridge if doing so involves some heavy lifting into an already cluttered room. Indeed, unless you have an unusual delivery man, it is quite likely that he will not want – or not be able – to install the bulky appliance for you. He is not allowed to (even if the terms of sale, and probably his instructions, are deliberately ambiguous). Because you will be told that he risks injuring himself through poor posture. Or damaging your furniture. In which case you could take action against him… The machine will stay on your doorstep.

This is one example among many. The combination of widespread victimhood and a systematic search for “culprits” in the event of accidents – or more generally of deviations from the norm – leads many organisations into deadlocks that are harmful to any activity.

One can understand it, however. When you risk being sued (even if you are cleared after months or years of proceedings), it is perfectly “rational” to impose more constraints on other stakeholders.

Too bad if, without your installation service, they have to find sympathetic neighbours willing to risk a bad back or a scratch on the wall. And, in another context, it will be perfectly rational, from your point of view, to force them to stay shut up at home when contact with others might expose them to a risk for which they might want to blame you.

So you take refuge behind standards, rules, procedures… Fixed and almost unchangeable, like a piece of office furniture (the “bureau” of the bureaucrat) – or a household appliance.

The madness of procedures

Procedure is the corollary of this risk aversion and one of the common expressions of bureaucracy.

Yet, contrary to popular belief, procedures do not reduce risks or increase safety. By formalising well-known situations, they simply make it possible to replicate established practices, including for inexperienced staff (or even automated systems). So it is practical and economical.

But faced with an unusual situation, to which established procedures cannot fully respond, the machine seizes up. So, of course, bureaucracy tends to supplement and refine them. This takes time – it is the all-too-familiar regulatory inflation, because it is safer to add a rule than to repeal one… “you never know”… And in the event of an accident, it is too late. In industrial safety, this is what Corinne Bieder and Mathilde Bourrier, among others, call “trapping safety into rules”. Or “the hell of rules”, as Christian Morel puts it.

In the life of our companies, it is the jungle of regulations, and the resulting insecurity for everyone. Some ignore them, with more or less peace of mind. Others revel in them. Others still are paralysed, torn between the taste for work well done and the inability to fulfil the mission without personal risk.

Here again, the “safest” thing is not to act. That is possible for the bureaucrat, who lives off the permanence of his organisation (in fact little exposed to the risk of competition or bankruptcy – at least, that is how he feels). For the entrepreneur, it is another matter…

And beyond even the possibility of controlling their inevitable inflation, the reflex of resorting to procedures reveals an even more dangerous bias. Do you really believe that the future can be written in rules of law – or in lines of code? Believing so is not only setting yourself up for great disappointment; it also means taking a rather unkind view of others… And many can probably picture the caricatured face of the “bureaucrat”. Lost, and sometimes sorry, or much more often disengaged, if not contemptuous.

The taste for control

Because bureaucracy is above all a taste for control. Control of things, control of others.

This is, incidentally, what Max Weber saw as the strength of this system of organisation. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, with industrialisation triumphant, people came to believe in the possibility of organising human systems like machines. Taylor’s “scientific management” would emerge, in which the division of roles – or rather of tasks – is key. In warfare, at the same time, the destructive violence of machines would be combined with a mechanistic approach to human bodies, in which numbers were still supposed to prevail – in theory at least.

Because for the bureaucrat, what matters is controlling reality, whether it is made of steel or of people.

A century later, have we abandoned this paradigm?

In our complex techno-human societies, have we all given up the omniscient ideal, the idea of a “providential man”? Or that of an inevitable destiny, because already mapped out, or in the hands of a demiurge – benevolent or censorious – who leaves no room for human freedom, and therefore for uncertainty?

Because if you had to choose between order and chaos, which would you prefer?

Rejection of uncertainty is, moreover, a French cultural trait, compared with other countries. A Cartesian legacy? Unless this way of thinking found such fertile ground in our country that it was able to emerge here when elsewhere it would have remained a minority view?

In any case, it is a pity that, at that same turn of the last century, many overlooked the contributions of the mathematician Henri Poincaré, who showed that chaos and unpredictability appear from the interactions of three bodies… Rather than imagining that we can manage modelled systems, we must therefore, most of the time, accept navigating along the ridge line of chaos, in our complex world of multiple interactions.

And navigating with others, because the providential, omniscient man alone at the top of the organisational pyramid does not exist – or at least does not possess these qualities.

The division of roles

Because the justification for bureaucracy – and its advantage, according to some – is that it defines everyone’s role precisely. With, a priori, a boss at the top and “power” cascading down to the smallest details.

Of course, clarity of organisation is a virtue. And “job descriptions” are indispensable for integrating and developing talent, setting objectives and assessing them…

But don’t we all know organisations where people complain about “silo working”? Or companies unable to provide good customer service because every request is pushed to another department? Can our world be described in simple categories?

Faced with a complex situation, one often has to rely on expertise when “generalist” approaches are no longer enough. But cross-functional working is often required to allow everyone to contribute part of the answer – the whole being, moreover, better suited than the sum of its parts.

And this cross-functionality is indispensable when creativity is at stake.

The assignment to a role or a skill that bureaucratic systems generate is therefore neither effective nor humanly satisfying. It may satisfy the organisation itself. But it rarely serves its purpose.

But there is something more serious. According to Hannah Arendt, bureaucracy is also the rule – even the tyranny – of Nobody. Because the complexity of bureaucratic systems, through the dispersal of skills and the dehumanisation of responsibility via procedures, leads to no one knowing who is “responsible” any more. Can a bureaucratic system become “autonomous”? It is probably a possibility, and one of its failings. And it is not surprising that one of the great questions in large organisations is that of “governance”.

This may, incidentally, be a fairly reliable indicator of organisations running out of control: if you are worried about your organisation’s “governance”, bureaucracy has taken over, and you no longer control it – even if your “status” suggests otherwise.

It is then high time to reintroduce freedom into the system, by breaking the fundamentals of bureaucracy. Accepting risk-taking, questioning the edifice and the reliance on procedures, preferring cross-functionality, collegiality and collective intelligence to a simplistic, impoverishing and disempowering division of roles.

In short, choosing the human factor which, when a crisis strikes or innovation is needed, is not the “weak link”, but the real pillar of organisational effectiveness and resilience.