The Bull Case for Bureaucracy
Despite its myriad faults, there are reasons why it exists and there are conditions under which it works well.
For simple, static tasks, bureaucracy can be like an engineering process: a mechanical, systematic way of executing multiple administrative tasks in a way that produces less friction than an alternative organic, ad hoc approach. The key is that it needs to be applied to the right subset of activities; it is not optimal in every instance.
An example might be, unbelievably, renewing a driver’s license. The New York State DMV shocked me a few years ago when it took me all of ten minutes to renew my license in person. Given the recommended arrival time, I ended up leaving their office before my scheduled appointment was to have started. This was possible because they had all the resources, lined up sequentially, in one place: a photographer, someone to vet the documents, etc. They also did a good job of telling me what I needed to bring. Nobody was more surprised than me.
Another key benefit of bureaucracy is that it slows down our decision-making process. It can impose a discipline where we might tend instead to jump to a conclusion.
There are a number of steps in effective decision-making:
· Reconnaissance: understand the problem that needs to be solved
· Conception of alternatives: think of options from which to choose (this helps us understand the problem in greater depth and makes it more likely that we find the best solution)
· Evaluation: flesh out the different paths to take and compare them across multiple dimensions
· Selection: pick the best option by considering each according to the organization’s preferences
“The wider the options you explore, the better your final decision is likely to be. Generating a number of different options may seem to make your decision more complicated at first, but the act of coming up with alternatives forces you to dig deeper and to look at the problem from different angles.”
Creating options is vital because it improves outcomes. But it’s also difficult and it takes time. Inexperienced or ineffective organizations spend far too little time on it because it is easier to jump in and start solving the problem, usually with something familiar. There is a reason marketing is so successful. It exploits availability bias: “the human tendency to rely on information that comes readily to mind when evaluating situations or making decisions.” This cognitive defect impairs the quality of our decisions.
Generating more options addresses this bias.
“According to prescriptive decision theories, the generation of options for choice is a central aspect of decision making. A too narrow representation of the problem may indeed limit the opportunity to evaluate promising options … ideation processes, possibly supported by search and thinking processes, seem to contribute to option generation beyond basic associative memory retrieval. The findings of the study also indicate that generating more options may have multifaceted consequences for choice, increasing the quality of the best option generated but decreasing the mean quality of the options in the generated set.”
Instead of pursuing what would appear to be the path of least resistance and leaping to the final decision, having a process forces us to execute the different steps, at least in theory. Think of the Request for Proposals process. It forces the buying organization to solicit bids in competition.
Of course, any process is only as good as those implementing it. While bureaucracy may work well on paper, if the staffing is weak, then everything we’ve said here about its benefits makes it break in practice. If the people at the DMV aren’t motivated by efficiency or the group deciding about what to buy is lazy or lacks conscientiousness, then the benefits can fail to appear, leaving only the cost. In a RFP context, this is called “shaping” the RFP in which a leading or incumbent supplier influences the writing of the document used to solicit proposals to favor his offering in a way that is so obvious, other suppliers decline to submit. It is a form of bid-rigging. It is a pro forma exercise in compliance with rules designed to protect the buying organization from “waste, fraud, and abuse.”