Pleasure was separated from work, means from end, effort from reward. Eternally shackled to one small fragment of the whole, man imagined himself to be a fragment, in his ear the constant and monotonous noise of the wheel that he turned … he simply became the impress of his occupation, his particular knowledge.

—Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man

The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all.

—Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death

Metaphysical Pathos

Whence flows our deep hatred of bureaucracy? It seems strange, does it not? Bureaucracy is just a way to structure social interactions, particularly in a large enterprise. True, it’s a way that others impose their wills on us, but we all understand that when we sign up to work for a company we give them the power to tell us what to do. Our time belongs to our employer. Why should we be bothered if our employer wants to waste it by making us feed the trolls with plates full of unnecessary paperwork? Yet bureaucracy is somehow nightmarish, something that disturbs us at a deep level.

The sociologist Alvin Gouldner, in Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy, talks about a “metaphysical pathos” surrounding bureaucracy.1 Where Weber saw a rational management technique, the rest of us see a way of life, deeply troubling and anxiety inducing. This, perhaps, is what distinguishes modern bureaucracy—it’s hard to imagine the ancient Egyptians or Romans suffering metaphysical anguish over a simple hierarchy and a set of rules. After all, they’d already ceded authority to a ruler; bureaucracy was merely the ruler’s tool.

Once again, it helps to look at the context in which modern bureaucracy arose. At 9:40 a.m. on November 1, 1755, just as the bureaucratic age was dawning, Lisbon was struck by one of the most deadliest earthquakes in history: a magnitude 8.5–9.0 convulsion that killed as many as 100,000 people and bounced Europe into the modern age. The earthquake was deeply troubling to intellectuals, who struggled to explain how its indiscriminate destruction of both good and evil could possibly have been the work of a just and benevolent God.* Where before people had believed that they could control their fates by pleasing a personal God, the world now appeared impersonal, hostile, or at best indifferent, implacable … mechanical.

Bureaucracy, rising immediately in its wake, was not just an administrative system, but indicative of the indifferent, mechanical world around us. It replaced God as the prime mover of a hostile world. It’s in that sense that Moby Dick, a fight against dumb, brute nature by a human who knows he can’t win, is a novel about bureaucracy, with harpoons and rope in place of offices and desks.

Bureaucracy as Nightmare: Literature

Gouldner’s “metaphysical pathos” is revealed in the way writers have chosen to write about bureaucracy. Their literature is largely about a world that operates according to its own bizarre nightmare logic—what we call surrealism. To choose a few examples:

Kafka’s protagonists live in a world both familiar and unfamiliar to us, one that seems logical, but logical in a way we don’t recognize. Joseph K. is accused of a crime and the authorities won’t tell him what it is. When one of his prosecutors says to another, “You see, Willem, he admits that he doesn’t know the Law and yet he claims he’s innocent,” we understand just what he means … sort of.

Ismail Kadare’s vision of The Palace of Dreams is a map of the unconscious, with dark, dusty corridors that branch off in all directions, unlabeled, with no way other than chance to stumble on what you’re searching for. Mark-Alem finds himself working at the palace and promoted for reasons he doesn’t understand—he’s only told that he “suits” the organization. Eventually, activities at the Palace of Dreams prove disastrous for his family and destabilizing for the Palace itself, after which the bureaucracy somehow reconfigures itself, now with Mark-Alem at its head.

José Saramago, in All the Names, paints us a dark, dusty archive into which Senhor José enters late at night to search for records. He works in a government bureau that rigidly controls all of its employees’ activities, both through tradition and coercion. Though the clerks are processing intimate records about human beings, their work lacks any connection to the people themselves. Senhor José rebels by trying to find someone whose record he has stolen from the archive.

In Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 even the postal bureaucracy is the source of paranoia and violence, and yet a mystery you want to understand. Catch-22, humorous and lighthearted through most of its chapters, somehow works its way up to a surreal scene where Yossarian walks the streets of Rome only to find a series of bizarre, dreamlike scenes. And David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King, about clerks at the IRS (Internal Revenue Service), includes unexplained moments where a character levitates from his chair.

“Metaphysical pathos” is an apt term for a literature of rebellion against—and inevitably defeat by—a bureaucratic order. Bartleby, in Melville’s short story “Bartleby the Scrivener,” enacts a gloomy rebellion against—what exactly?—refusing the work he’s assigned with “I’d prefer not to.” Ultimately, he starves to death in debtor’s prison. In Akira Kurosawa’s film Ikiru, Watanabe’s rebellion against bureaucratic unhelpfulness, told through a series of flashbacks, leads his colleagues to a brief and fleeting realization that they must rebel against the bureaucratic order … an insight that fades with hangovers and daylight the day after his funeral.

Immovable obstacles. Odd laws. Weird logic. Futile rebellion. Inevitability. Paranoia. Bureaucracy.

I Got That, But Why Exactly Is It Bad?

A critical point to remember: a digital transformation blocked by bureaucracy does not have to address any of this metaphysical pathos. We don’t have to reach Kafka’s castle, navigate the Palace of Dreams, or figure out who’s undermining the postal system. Frustrating as it may be, the kind of bureaucracy we want to fight is simply an administrative system. It means us no harm.

To overcome bureaucracy, we need to separate those of its aspects that are problematic from those that are not, and focus our efforts on the former. We must disengage from the metaphysical pathos and reengage in a practical way. Let’s now identify the actual bad stuff.

1: Surprise!—It’s Inefficient

Despite Weber’s unbounded enthusiasm for bureaucracy’s efficiency, those of us who encounter it today are less keen. James Q. Wilson, speaking of government agencies but intending his words to apply to businesses as well,2 says that to citizens and taxpayers,

bureaucrats are lethargic, incompetent hacks, who spend their days spinning out reels of red tape and reams of paperwork, all the while going to great lengths to avoid doing the job they were hired to do. Their agencies chiefly produce waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement.3

To Stewart Clegg, a sociologist teaching at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, “bureaucracy is synonymous with inefficient business administration, pettifogging legalism, and red tape.”4 I enjoy that term, pettifogging,† a word I’ve never used in my own sentences. Red tape I’ll take to mean excess process, waste, a lack of leanness, so these authors’ comments amount to one thing—bureaucracy, Weber’s views notwithstanding, is not actually effective at doing what it sets out to do. It’s not a rational way to organize.

Indeed, that’s why those of us who write about IT leadership today object to it. We see today’s business environment as dominated by rapid change, uncertainty, and complexity. To cope with it, organizations need speed: short lead times, unconstrained experimentation, and fast feedback, all of which bureaucracy resists. Bureaucracy’s division of labor by function—what we often call siloing today—is one culprit, since work must be passed from one group to another (from software development to testing to operations, for example) with delays compounding at each handoff.

According to von Mises, bureaucracy is necessarily inefficient, since it’s the system that’s used for management when there’s no market value for the services produced. Since nonprofits and government agencies can always spend more trying to deliver better service, their spending must be checked by rules and people who can say no—that is, a bureaucracy.6 Even in market-serving, profit-seeking corporations, areas like compliance, risk management, human resources, and administration don’t directly touch customers. Only bureaucratic controls can determine how much compliance and risk management and workplace snacks should be produced.

2: Its Goals Are Displaced

Even if the rules and hierarchy are set up to further the goals of the organization, over time, the aims become less important; all that remains is adherence to rules and process. There is, as Merton says, a displacement of goals to the rules themselves rather than to their desired outcomes.7 Rules are fetishized; they “become symbolic in cast, rather than strictly utilitarian.”8

Over time, goal displacement becomes more severe as new hires are trained in the rules rather than in their purpose. And since officials are admired for their knowledge of the rules’ subtleties and their ability to recall the rules’ minutia, enforcement of the rules becomes entwined with an official’s self-worth. In our government environment, employees take immense pride in knowing the details of the elephantine six-thousand-page FAR—more pride, it often seems, than in how fairly they managed procurements themselves.

3: It Stifles Innovation

In “Bureaucracy and New Product Innovation,” James D. Hlavacek argues that because innovation always seems inefficient, it can have no place in a bureaucracy—which, as we know, is designed for efficiency (that idea again! Damn you, Max!).9 Companies have optimized their processes for doing what they did well in the past; new ideas are inefficient because they disrupt those processes and demand, at least for a time, practices that are not yet finely tuned. In fact, bureaucracies are designed for precisely the opposite of innovation—they routinize what the company has done to make it repeatable. Innovation requires a sudden leap, a movement outside today’s roles and rules, and as such is resisted.

Ideally, the market would determine whether an innovation should be pursued. But in a bureaucracy, it’s a proxy for the market that makes decisions—the bureaucratic hierarchy, through its budgeting or capital investment mechanisms. Entrepreneurs in a capitalist system are free to try out new ideas even if everyone thinks they are crazy; ultimately, only their success or failure matters. But in a bureaucracy, an entrepreneur has to convince those higher in the organization, often those who were responsible for promulgating the status quo.

Employees in a bureaucracy have well-defined tasks. Since they’re assessed on their performance of those tasks, innovation is just wasted effort with no reward. Wilson sums this up as a bureaucratic principle: “Never do anything for the first time.”10

4: It Fosters Blind Spots

Safe within a framework of rules that legitimize their actions, employees become passive and stop trying to do what they know to be best. After a discussion of new techniques in software development, an employee at USCIS might say, “Yes, but none of that’s possible—DHS will never let us do it.” Or I’d be asked to “be practical and stop talking about things we just can’t do.”

What an official has been trained to do in the past becomes a blind spot in the face of change.11 Functionaries develop “special preferences, antipathies, discriminations, and emphases” that over time take away their ability to adapt the rules to new circumstances they encounter.12 Various terms have been used to capture this phenomenon: trained incapacity, occupational psychosis, or professional deformation.13 Again, it’s important to take note of our context today: with the rapid change we experience in the digital world, trained incapacity is a serious problem.

5: It Dehumanizes

Bureaucracy substitutes mechanisms for ordinary human interaction. In its striving for impersonality—application of rules without regard to human considerations—it loses sight of the individual. Bureaucracy requires the high levels of discipline and the loss of individuality characteristic of an army. Because it considers human choice to be a danger, it demands that officials refrain from using their judgment.14 Clearly, bureaucracy values conformity and reliable behavior;15 otherwise, how could it deliver “calculability?”

Antibureaucrats dream of a future where positive human interactions once again matter, a future where work involves the whole person, and where organizational relationships are based on influence, persuasion, and collaboration rather than just exercises of hierarchical authority.

6: It Oversimplifies

To make its rules general enough to apply in all cases, bureaucracy simplifies by abstracting only those characteristics that are relevant to a rule. If you must be over twenty-one to drink in Missouri, your only relevant attribute is your age; in particular, whether it is over or under twenty-one. It doesn’t matter if you’re from a European family that’s used to drinking wine with every meal. It doesn’t matter if you’re mature for your age. The rule simplifies by placing you into one of two categories. In doing so, it disregards the true complexity of life as it is lived.

Merton explains that general categories are essential to bureaucracy:

The activities of “trained and salaried experts” are governed by general, abstract, and clearly defined rules which preclude the necessity for the issuance of specific instructions for each specific case. The generality of the rules requires the constant use of categorization, whereby individual problems and cases are classified on the basis of designated criteria and are treated accordingly.16

The extent of categorization often depends on the extent of centralization. This is at the root of James Scott’s case in Seeing Like a State, where he argues that a state’s tendency toward categorization and generalization loses important practical knowledge that is held closer to the activities they are governing.17 The same, as I said, was true at DHS. Utopian planners like Le Corbusier‡ often take a bureaucratic, rationalist, simplifying, distant approach. The cities designed on this basis, Chandigarh (Le Corbusier) and Brasília (Lúcio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer, and Joaquim Cardozo), are notably cold and inhospitable environments because, though they were rationally designed to meet social and economic objectives, they were laid out in the absence of the practical wisdom and natural impulses of the people who would eventually live in them.

While this sounds like a good argument for decentralization, there are nuances to consider. Although the US began as a commonwealth of self-governing colonies, it eventually became a union with a large amount of centralized control. Though the amount and the nature of that control is very much under debate today, Americans have found it useful to have a central authority that manages at least defense and foreign relations and applies the principles of a national constitution. Or, taking enterprise IT organizations as an example, centralized control may help by promoting information security and by negotiating contracts, even while other functions are decentralized.

Categorization leads to the frustration we often feel in the presence of bureaucracy. In Merton’s words:

Since functionaries minimize personal relations and resort to categorization, the peculiarities of individual cases are often ignored. But the client who, quite understandably, is convinced of the special features of his own problem often objects to such categorical treatment.18

7: It’s Not Enough

Bureaucracy, somehow, misses the point. By laying down in law exactly how the company should operate, it leaves out the part of business that has to do with inspiration and strategy. Somehow a company has to create itself; it has to find a niche by satisfying customers. Even if it never innovates again thereafter, it still needs to respond to competition, devise strategies for minimizing its taxes, design the office cafeteria, figure out how best to hang motivational posters on its walls. And how did that very first innovation happen? It seems like bureaucracy leaves out the critical part of business success.

I know, traditional bureaucracy presupposed that those things happen among top management of the company, and bureaucracy is the tool they then use to control their workers once the creative work is done. But in the white-collar service economy, inspiration and creativity are more likely to be needed throughout time and across levels of the hierarchy.

Even in those more controlled parts of an enterprise, rules can never cover enough details to fully run the business. That’s why unions have sometimes used a work-to-rule protest rather than a strike. Unionized employees are told to follow the rules exactly, which turns out to be an exceptionally efficient way to get nothing done.

8: It’s Coercive

Bureaucracy is a way to control employees based on the assumption that left to themselves, they’ll do the wrong thing. In a factory, bureaucratic rules may specify when employees can take breaks, what penalties will be imposed for absenteeism, and where they may eat their lunches. There might be quotas for production, and it’s likely there are forms to be filled out to track performance.

Our typical encounters with bureaucracy are big “no”s. We submit our expenses for reimbursement and are told that they’re a dollar over the allowable threshold. We try to get an employee some computing equipment they need and are told that it is nonstandard, nonacceptable, and non-going-to-happen. We try to build software to solve a business problem and are told that we haven’t written our requirements in enough detail.

Graeber says that “bureaucracy represents an inherent flaw in the democratic project.”19 “In principle,” he says, “all of these stuffy functionaries in their offices, with their elaborate chains of command, should have been mere feudal holdovers.”20 And there is something feudal-seeming about it; what Weber saw as a rational division of responsibilities can also be an irrational distribution of power to officials who hoard and exercise it coercively.

The rules of MD-102 are rules about what you must or must not do. The real purpose of its gate reviews is to stop a project from proceeding: the possible outcomes of a review are “bad” or “acceptable”—never “good.” Permission to continue is given grudgingly, if at all, rather than with an enthusiastic offer of support. Safeguarding the public interest is viewed as saying no to things that might threaten it rather than incubating things that will advance it.

There’s an interesting parallel to IT practices. For many years, we built IT systems that deliberately constrained users. Each input field on a screen had its purpose; anything a user typed was “validated” and rejected unless it met restrictive criteria. We spoke of “idiot-proofing” our systems, meaning that we forbade users from doing just any old thing they might find useful. Users were discouraged from using the system in any way other than what was specified in a user manual. In the British TV comedy Little Britain, a bank worker responds to every customer request by entering it into her computer and reporting “Computer says no!”21

Today this paradigm is changing. It has to, because the people who use company IT systems have gotten used to the flexibility and convenience of smartphones and the other devices they spend their days with. IT systems have begun to allow users to enter free text to initiate searches, rather than limiting them to checkboxes and required fields. They may see “type-ahead” dropdowns (those boxes with helpful suggestions that appear as you are typing text) to help them along. Analytic tools and data lakes make it easier for users to follow their own trains of thought. Instead of constraints, IT systems are increasingly designed to present possibilities. In the words of John Brady, CISO of FINRA, they lower the cost of curiosity.22

9: It Petrifies

As value is displaced from goals to the rules themselves, the rules become a tradition and a bond that holds the community together. In von Mises’s words, “Formalism, even ritualism, ensues with an unchallenged insistence upon punctilious adherence to formalized procedures.”23

Our gate reviews at USCIS were religious ceremonies—QA reassuringly began each by formally calling the roll to make sure all the signatories were present, laying out ground rules that were the same every time (“Please pay careful attention as the flight attendants demonstrate the use of the safety equipment”), leading the meeting through a standardized series of reports, and in the end asking me, “Do you approve?” and then asking each of the signatories in turn, “Do you concur?” Amen. Then everyone around the table stood up and shook hands.

Once rules become rituals, changing them is tantamount to breaking apart the community. The rigidity with which rules are applied becomes a rigidity in the rules themselves. Our idea that MD-102 should be changed to actually encourage—rather than just permit—the new best practices was not just dismissed but viewed as bizarre and dangerous. Even those who accepted that our new practices might work better resisted making them into a new rule, because the old rule was still the rule, even if not the practice.

Perhaps in Weber’s day the pace of change was slower, allowing him to assume that an efficient process would remain an efficient process indefinitely. Or perhaps it’s just an instance of the old philosophical conflict between rationalism and empiricism. Bureaucracy is a rationalist enterprise: it uses logic, rather than experience, to find the best processes. Once you’ve done that, empirical experience is irrelevant—you already know the best way. But that puts you in an inconvenient position when the PRA just doesn’t do what it was meant to do.

10: It’s Risky by Being Risk-Averse

Bureaucracy is a way to mitigate the risk of trying out newfangled ideas. Its slow, careful, managed pace of change is based on defining repeatable processes and refining them to the point where they’re emptied of risk and institutionalized as commandments. In a fast-changing environment, however, this makes them all the more risky. Efficiency is the wrong goal if you are risk averse today; what you really want is flexibility, the ability to sense change and respond creatively to it. The problem with bureaucracy is not that it is risk averse but that it is risky.

Verdict: Bureaucracy, Meh, Okay

Bureaucracy is inefficient, wasteful, dehumanizing, coercive, oversimplifying, and risk averse. It leads to a focus on means rather than ends, trained incapacity, and petrification. All true, at least for the bureaucracies we typically find blocking our way. But is it possible that there are bureaucracies around us every day that we don’t notice because they aren’t in our way? And are these characteristics essential to bureaucracy, or might they just happen to accompany it?

Assuming we accept, more or less, Weber’s definition of bureaucracy—in my handy oversimplification, rigid rules and rigid roles—the answer is a bit of both. Bureaucracy does indeed require simplification, abstraction, and unfreedom. Simplification, however, can be good or bad. Just as abstraction is needed in mathematics and science to make possible higher-order discoveries, it’s needed in active organizations to make possible coordinated activity.

Petrification, however, was never part of Weber’s conception. The hierarchy was to be filled with experts—professionals—who would stay up to date in their fields of expertise. Through their experience in the bureaucracy, their skills and knowledge would also increase day by day. Bureaucracy was to be “domination through knowledge,” capturing institutional learning and repurposing it into efficient rules for action.

As for the obsession with means over ends and the trained incapacity, these are simply management challenges. Bureaucracy is not unique; in any organization, it’s up to managers to help their employees overcome cultural “psychoses.”

Bureaucracy is dehumanizing to the extent that it’s mechanical and imposed from the outside, a leviathan that bats humans about now and then with its tail. There’s no way to persuade Moby Dick to cooperate with his hunters and stop destroying boats. But to Weber, “impersonality” meant only that rules were to be applied without bias or caprice—not that people would be made to feel helpless.

*	Susan Neiman’s book Evil in Modern Thought provides a great description of how the earthquake affected the intellectual history of Europe. -au.
†	It’s actually derived from the word “petty” and an archaic word “fogger,” or huckster. The German root is also written as “fucker.”5
‡	Le Corbusier (1887–1965): a Swiss-French architect and urban planner. Among his sayings: “To create architecture is to put in order. Put what in order? Function and objects.” And “Modern life demands, and is waiting for, a new kind of plan, both for the house and the city.” -ed.