The Bureaucratic Failure Mode Pattern (2014) | Hacker News Reader

The Bureaucratic Failure Mode Pattern (2014)

habitatchronicles.com

28 pointsMelchizedek12 comments

A nice article with many important insights, such as: "In the extreme case, the cumulative costs of all the checkpoints within an organization can exceed the working resources the organization has available, and forward progress becomes impossible."

A generalization of this key insight also appears, illustrated with many historical examples, in The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter

In his book, he outlines how bureaucracy increases in complex societies up to the point they are collapsing under it. The key reason for this collapse is the diminishing marginal return of bureaucracy.

It is my hope that we find a way to prevent societal collapse due to bureaucracy by automating arising tasks cleverly. However, most things I see at the moment, even most computer projects, tend to further increase bureaucracy and even also add new failure modes.

I'd disagree progress becomes impossible, for the simple reason at this point rules and processes start getting bypassed or skipped altogether.

I once had a role in management at a mid size software company. The company was quite stodgy, with a lot of regulations and processes. If I'd wanted to I could have worked a solid 60 hours a week keeping up with all the process and procedure changes, and then following them. After attempting just this, I realized in a few weeks I did not want to, so I simply stopped. And guess what? Nothing happened. Of course I heard about a few things that needed to be done, and quickly learned exactly which ten of the hundreds of processes were important; or rather had someone who's job it was to track them.

I continued in a this purely reactive manner, saving myself a lot of work and trouble, and had a really high performing team in the organization. There was an article some weeks ago about the merits of doing nothing, indeed this is why I don't believe this article expresses a valid concern.

Bertrand Russell, In praise of idleness. -- An iconic essay from 1914 ;-)

My goodness, that prose is turgid! I stopped reading after two paragraphs full of subordinate clauses and parentheses, and gave up.

What, you don't like multiple paragraphs with sub paragraph parenthetical phrases and taking the time to make sure the reader understands how these business processes are 'barnacles' but then tries to have it both ways by saying he won't use the phrase further. Like you haven't put the idea in the readers head, directly.

I like short sentences. I like articles that give you a clue what the gist is, somewhere in the first paragraph. Of course, multiple paras is good; provided the paras themselves are good.

This bloviation is from the second para:

<quote> Note that I’m not talking about the intrinsic difficulty or inconvenience of the process itself (car registration might entail waiting around for several hours in the DMV office or it might be 30 seconds online with a web page, for example), but the cost imposed by the mere existence of the need to report information or get permission or put things in some particular way just so or align or coordinate with some other thing (and the concomitant need to know that you are supposed to do whatever it is, and the need to know or find out how). </quote>

That single sentence(!) is simply unkind to the reader.

(Hmm - looks like I don't know how to do a blockquote)

> A more user-friendly way to approach the problem is to foster an institutional culture that sees the avoidance of checkpoints as a value unto itself. This is very hard to do, and I am hard pressed to think of any examples of organizations that have managed to do this consistently over the long term. Even in the short term, examples are few, and tend to be smaller organizations embedded within much larger, more traditional ones.

As I am fond of saying: "People don't scale".

The only way one manages to synchronize large numbers of people on a task is through coercive, authoritarian means, e.g., the military.

This was also discussed in length (with a more optimistic outcome) by Reed Hastings of Netflix in this podcast (and I assume in his book that I haven't read):

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/book-club-hastings/

Highly recommend the podcast!

checkpoints are regression tests against past failures. Without them, somebody else is handling those failures

Fossilised procedures are tests against failures which either happened a long time ago or which someone decided might happen.

Neither may apply today.

'Neither may apply today' is quite the phrase. I mean asbestos used to cause mesothelioma and be highly regulated, but neither may apply today.

I'm pretty sure that asbestos still causes mesothelioma and that's unlikely to change. And where I am, it is still quite regulated, as we had a property inspected for it, because it is still found in older buildings.

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