The man who is guided by reason is more free in a state where he lives under a system of law than in solitude where he obeys only himself.

—Baruch Spinoza, Ethics

In limitations he first shows himself the master,
And the law can only bring us freedom.

—Goethe, Was Wir Bringen

What’s so terrible about bureaucracy, then, aside from a bit of dehumanization, inefficiency, learned helplessness, and metaphysical pathos? Alright, those aside, is there something about bureaucracy that we actually like, something that is useful to us? What would an advocate of bureaucracy—if such a person existed—say, not in its defense, but in its praise?

The following are some aspects of bureaucracy we might want to borrow as we design our digital organizations.

Ethical Considerations: Bureaucracy Is Fair

A particular ethical attitude is required of bureaucrats, a willingness to put their own beliefs and biases aside and proceed purely on the basis of what benefits the organization.

The ethical attributes of the “good” bureaucrat—strict adherence to procedure, commitment to the purposes of the office, abnegation of personal moral enthusiasms, and so on—represent a remarkable achievement.1

Weber spoke of a Lebensordnung, or ethical life-order, implicit in bureaucracy.2 Procedural fairness is built in, preventing officials from giving special treatment based on past allegiances, or on personal or family relationships. An official’s duty is to the role and to fulfilling it in the way it was designed, not to their own interests. According to Clegg, “One way of reading Weber’s account of bureaucracy is as a treatise on the formation of a particular type of moral character bounded by an emotionally strong sense of duty as a vocation.”3 As Professor Paul du Gay of Copenhagen Business School relays, Weber believes the bureaucrat:

‘takes pride in preserving his impartiality, overcoming his own inclinations and opinions, so as to execute in a conscientious and meaningful way what is required of him by the general definition of his duties or by some particular instruction, even—and particularly—when they do not coincide with his own political views.’4

This ethic of self-abnegation is simply not a consideration in systems of leadership by notables. Kingship is necessarily the practice of nepotism. Aristocrats have special privileges rivaling even those of Diamond Medallion frequent flyers. To be admitted to the Tower of London one needed only to be disliked by the king. Charismatic leaders such as Hitler and Charles Manson had no need for fairness when choosing their victims. To Weber, on the other hand, an ethic of fairness was essential to any system that would be based on rationality rather than emotion and arbitrariness.

In the government, we were constrained by the procurement process of the colossal six-thousand-page FAR. We weren’t allowed to just choose a vendor that we “knew” was best; we had to give others a fair chance to compete for our business. If we’d been allowed to choose based on our preferences—whether we intended it or not, whether we were conscious of it or not—our choices would have been influenced by our preconceived ideas, our incomplete knowledge, our prior relationships with vendors, or our comfort in working with incumbents. To avoid such biases, the FAR required us to clearly define the requirements of each procurement, decide in advance how we would evaluate the bids, let the vendors know, and then make sure that we applied exactly those criteria when making a decision. It was a pain in the neck, and it took a lot of effort—that is to say, it was costly and slow—and didn’t always lead to the best result. But the ideal of equal treatment overrode those problems.

We should want bureaucrats not to treat us as individuals, because impersonality prevents arbitrary, discriminatory, and abusive treatment.5 Employees are protected from their managers because both are constrained by rules and formal interaction patterns.6 Someone who is unhappy with the way a bureaucracy is treating them is presumably someone who thinks they deserve special treatment; they’ll inevitably find that special treatment at the very least requires paperwork, red tape, sign-offs, and frustration.7 And so it should be, no?

A bureaucracy is also meant to be a meritocracy. It standardizes the requirements for each role and thereby makes the role available to anyone who qualifies. By formalizing recruitment, application, and selection, and by using standardized tests or other assessment criteria, it extends that fairness into all its hiring-related activities.8 Compared to technology companies, government IT employs a rather diverse workforce. Could this be because the hiring and promotion process is set up for fairness, while the commercial sector has conscious or unconscious biases that prevent it from becoming diverse?

To be honest, I’m a fan of neither the mountainous six-thousand-page FAR nor the government’s hiring process, because I believe their goals can better be met by simpler and less wasteful processes. But, for the most part, they’re honest attempts at equal treatment and fairness (I say for the most part because they’re influenced by lobbying, and because the procurement process tends to exclude small companies that can’t afford the costs of the burdensome process). And let’s not forget that the hiring process might inadvertently discriminate against certain groups, and that the culture of a particular government agency might not promote inclusion. But the intention is to use standard criteria to reduce the effect of personal biases. If anything, the problem is not that the FAR and the hiring process impose bureaucratic rules—it is that they may be the wrong rules.

Its ethical basis makes bureaucracy consistent with the modern world’s humanistic principles. “To oppose bureaucracy,” Clegg says, “is to oppose a particular conception of modernity as rational, legal, meritocratic, and universalistic.”9

Formality and Role Definitions

The literature of IT is a literature by and for creative knowledge workers; its discomfort with bureaucracy might not be shared by everyone across an organization. Even if the business world is digitizing rapidly, there are still many jobs that require discipline, routinization, and process efficiency—repetitive work in mass production, clerical processing, and routine service operations, for example. It’s not that those roles don’t require innovation, but their innovation is generally related to efficiency and to continuous improvement of cost, quality, and timeliness.10 Bureaucracy may be ideally suited.

Even knowledge work includes routine tasks that can be handled more smoothly and with less frustration through bureaucratization. Studies have found that the more routine the tasks, the more acceptable a formalized, standardized approach is to employees.11 Other studies indicate that employees don’t mind routinized processes as long as they’re designed well,12 are consistent with their values, and can be seen as furthering their goals.13

In fact, there are many cases where employees ask for more bureaucracy. I’m talking about those moments we all experience when we get frustrated with vaguely distributed responsibilities or disappointed in how other employees are contributing and ask, “Can you please tell me exactly what my responsibility is?” or, “Can you clarify what my job description is?” or, “Can you tell me who’s accountable for this?” or, “Isn’t there some kind of lethal injection for people like my coworker?”

It shouldn’t surprise us, then, that increased formalization of roles tends to increase job satisfaction and commitment.14 Hugh Willmot, a professor of management and organization studies at Cass Business School in the UK, speaks of “the distinctive capacity of bureaucracy to clarify responsibilities, ease role stress, and thereby enable employees to work effectively.”15 Edgar Schein considers corporate culture, his field of study, to be a mechanism for making the world meaningful and predictable, thereby reducing employee anxiety.16 If that is so, bureaucracy contributes to corporate culture by delineating and formalizing those aspects of roles that are routine. Fewer things for employees to stress over leads to more areas where they know for sure they are performing acceptably.

Perhaps most telling is that when unions advocate for workers, their goal is to increase the formalization of rules and roles. Collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) might include clauses along the lines of “employees shall be granted fifteen-minute breaks after each three hours of work time” or establish formal grievance procedures. Our CBA at USCIS included precise measurements for cubicle size depending on an employee’s level in the hierarchy, and requirements that seniority be considered in assigning employees to tasks, giving promotions, or deciding whom to lay off in the event of reductions.

Size and Scale

Bureaucracy helps coordinate activities across units of a large enterprise by formalizing the interactions among them. Schein says that

with increasing organizational size, people can no longer remain functionally familiar with others, so they have to resort to more formal processes of contracting, monitoring each other, and in general substituting processes and procedures for personal contact.17

Interestingly, he’s not saying that bureaucracy makes processes impersonal and formal, but the opposite: that the increasing size of the enterprise causes the need for impersonal and formal interactions, which we then label bureaucracy. Here again, Schein’s description of corporate culture comes startlingly close to ours of bureaucracy: “Every organization that succeeds develops a way of structuring work; defining the production and marketing processes; and creating the kinds of information, reward, and control systems it needs to operate effectively.”18 Bureaucracy, in this sense, is an aspect of corporate culture that provides—dammit—those efficiency benefits.

As an example, my team at AWS accepts requests for our participation in customer meetings from around the AWS enterprise. Our wiki explains how those who want our services should proceed. In some cases we ask them to fill out a ticket in our ticketing system, where they answer a set of questions that helps us prioritize their requests. The wiki explains how we’ll respond to those tickets and under what conditions we’ll accommodate the requests. This bit of bureaucracy both formalizes a process and helps clarify our role in the division of labor. It brings order to a process that was becoming chaotic and difficult to manage as the enterprise grew.

Compliance and Grimaces

In an era where compliance frameworks are proliferating, bureaucracy provides an effective way to cope with them and keep auditors smiling.* “Bureaucratic management is management bound to comply with detailed rules and regulations fixed by the authority of a superior body,” says von Mises.19 Bureaucracy is compliance, so no wonder that it can help us survive compliance audits. “Even where bureaucratic behavior is not so routinized that it can be conveniently prescribed by rule, we insist on rules when there is a significant risk of an impermissible outcome.”20 The key word is impermissible—in this case, falling out of compliance. Bureaucracy, in this sense, is a factory within the organization whose product is compliance. That product has value: it lets the company operate in a regulated environment. It is a foundation for all of the other value the company produces.

Persistence of Memory

In the corkboard example I gave in the introduction, a team tried to introduce a formal process to solve a problem they had experienced. They were turning their learning—that a diagram posted on a corkboard might get misplaced—into a rule that would prevent the problem’s occurring in the future. Bureaucracy is a “vast organizational memory of best practices”21 that helps us avoid constantly reinventing the circular block of rigid material that spins around an axle.†

When we optimize processes or solve problems, we memorialize our findings in a documented process, an SOP, or a manifesto. Formalized processes are precisely the specialty of bureaucracies. They’re also—no coincidence here—the specialty of information technologists, who, as Adler noted, “objectify” know-how in equipment and software.22

In one of the classic works that fueled the Agile IT revolution, Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka argued that “knowledge is [also] transmitted in the organization by converting project activities to standard practice…. Naturally, companies try to institutionalize the lessons derived from their successes.”23 Companies naturally, in other words, turn successful practices into bureaucracy. Formalized processes can be examined, improved, benchmarked, and agreed upon, where informal processes cannot. Du Gay adds, “Process is care and thoroughness; it is consultation, involvement and co-ownership; it is (as we were reminded by the failure of international process in the run-up to the Iraq war) legitimacy and acceptance; it is also record, auditability and clear accountability.”24

Rational Results and Capitalism

Markets require a type of transparency and predictability that is well served by what Weber called the “calculability of results” of bureaucracy.25 A broadcaster needs to know what FCC rules it must satisfy in order to be allowed to do business. A company incorporating in Delaware needs to know what the requirements will be and whose approval it must seek.

On their part, commercial entities need to satisfy investors by providing transparency into their operations. The bureaucracy that is a company’s budgeting process, its spending and procurement processes, and its operational SOPs all contribute to the predictability that capital markets require. Sarbanes-Oxley was created to reassure investors that they could trust the information provided by companies; it’s a compliance bureaucracy that lubricates the capital markets.

It’s the very impersonality of the market that makes entrepreneurship possible. For entrepreneurs and investors to risk their time and capital in new ventures, they must have some measure of security such as that provided by laws and—perhaps predictability is not the right word—they must know that their efforts will have rational results.26

Green Eggs and Meaning

Rules are the background to our creative activity; they’re guardrails and frameworks that structure our efforts but don’t fully constrain them. Creativity is not only allowed; it’s facilitated by rules that provide a structure within which experts can exercise their skills.

Art—which we imagine as the height of creativity—is also highly constrained. A painter works with paint and canvas, not with dance and song. Western music is made with the twelve notes of the scale. The composer Igor Stravinsky once said that “the more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.”27 The meaning of an artist’s work is found partly in its context in the history of art and the cultural milieu in which it is created; yet artists do not choose their circumstances. Rebellion rebels against something.

There’s a technique in literature called constrained writing, where authors accept an arbitrary set of rules within which to work. In lipograms, for example, a particular letter is avoided; in an acrostic, the first letters of successive words or sentences form another word or sentence. Sonnets and haikus have exacting structural constraints. And Dr. Suess wrote all of Green Eggs and Ham using only fifty different words on a fifty-dollar bet he’d made.28

In IT, software engineering remains a creative discipline. It does not become less so if we surround it with guardrails to make sure that the code is secure, resilient, and scalable, or if we apply some enterprise architecture standards. In fact, those guardrails can take some of the weight off software engineers and leave them free to focus on the creative aspects of their work.

Creativity, innovation, practice of a professional specialty—these all happen within formal frameworks that give them meaning. Structure—in itself—does not oppose innovation or human interaction—it is the background against which they appear.

Verdict: Bureaucracy Not Evil

Bureaucracy is a reasonable path to accomplishing certain types of goals—say, guaranteeing fairness or establishing compliance. It can institutionalize best practices and give comfort to employees with highly routine jobs. For Adler, the problem with bureaucracy is the coercive manner in which it is often applied.29 To me, the waste that typically attaches to bureaucracy is the main evil. In Part II, I’ll combine these ideas and lay out a path to making bureaucracy workable, and even in some cases desirable, in a digital enterprise.

Even for von Mises, a determined critic of bureaucracy, the problem isn’t bureaucracy itself, but how and where we choose to use it.30

The assertion that bureaucratic management is an indispensable instrument of democratic government is paradoxical. Many will object. They are accustomed to consider democratic government as the best system of government and bureaucratic management as one of the great evils. How can these two things, one good, the other bad, be linked together? … To these objections we must answer again that bureaucracy in itself is neither good nor bad. It is a method of management which can be applied in different spheres of human activity.31

Even within a framework of rules and authorities, officials can approach their jobs with energy, rigor, integrity, inventiveness, and attention to efficiency and effectiveness.32

*	I’m pretty sure I’ve seen an auditor smile, though it could have been a grimace. -au.
†	The wheel. Schwartz has a passionate hatred of clichés. We’ve spent months trying to help him find an alternative to “cog in a wheel” and have concluded that there isn’t one. -ed.