OVERTURE: TRY IT YOURSELF

OVERTURE:
TRY IT YOURSELF

He gains consciousness from sensuous slumber, sees that he is a man, looks around and finds himself to be living in a state. Force of need cast him there before he was capable of freely choosing this condition.

—Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man

Everything is simpler than we can imagine, at the same time more complex and intertwined than can be comprehended.

—Goethe

A Revelatory Puzzle

Imagine that you’re going to create a large organization from scratch to produce a product or accomplish a mission. Or perhaps you’ve been asked to take over management of a big group of people who are standing around waiting for you to tell them what to do. Organizations grow and evolve, but let’s just shortcut all of that and say that you suddenly have, oh, 100,000 people or so sitting in your corporate cafeteria and twiddling their thumbs impatiently. Incidentally, this is in some ways the situation DHS found itself in when it was founded in 2003 after the 9/11 attacks—it was created by bringing together people from twenty-two existing agencies to somehow keep the country safe.1*

Now how will you set up your organization? More precisely, how will you coordinate those 100,000 people to work toward a common goal—your goal? You’ll probably need someone to be in charge, right? We’ll call that person the CEO. And unless you want to have 100,000 people reporting to the CEO, you’ll probably need some sort of a hierarchy to keep the thing organized. Perhaps you’ll have one part of the company focus on sales, another part on marketing, and another on producing the product. That’s particularly sensible because people tend to be skilled or at least educated in one thing or the other, and with that kind of structure you can use their skills efficiently.

For each part of the hierarchy, you’ll probably need to tell them what their job description is—what they’re responsible for. Perhaps their goals will involve some quantifiable metrics. You also know that since they’ll all be spending money, there’s a danger that they’ll spend too much. In fact—it’s virtually guaranteed that they will, other things being equal, because spending more will always allow them to do more of whatever you’re holding them responsible for. So perhaps you’ll assign each group a maximum they can spend and set up some processes to keep track of the cash they toss around so you can do your tax returns at the end of the year.

You can’t just create these hierarchies—you also need ways for people in them to interact to get the job done. And because the organization is large, you can’t count on informal communications. So, you work with them to set up some formal interaction patterns. For example, Marketing will generate and capture leads, and then pass them on to Sales. Salespeople might learn from their customers what product attributes are valuable, so you’ll make sure they have a way to communicate that information to the product design team.

The financial market regulators and the government want to make sure you’re transparent and have controls in place, for example, to protect investors. So, you make someone a CFO and charge them with reporting on what everyone else is doing and with establishing controls that will satisfy auditors.

Let’s see what you’ve done. You’ve set up a hierarchy based on a division of labor, a separation of responsibilities. You’ve instituted a merit system where the good marketers are placed into Marketing, the good operators into Operations, and the Royal Fools† into disciplinary proceedings. You’ve structured their interactions to best achieve the company’s goals and established formal ceremonies to facilitate those interactions. And you’ve thrown in some rules-based, auditor-friendly controls as guardrails to satisfy authorities.

Congratulations. You’ve created a bureaucracy.

Don’t feel bad about yourself, Homo bureaucraticus. You’re not the first.


*	Fun fact: speaking of bureaucracy, over 108 congressional subcommittees oversee DHSR.2 Surprised that it’s hard to get anything done? -au.
†	See next chapter for more on Royal Fools. -ed.