As a leader in Bureaucracy, your job is...?
Public sector bureaucracies have a critical role in solving the world's collective problems, but let’s get honest, they are not currently fit for purpose institutions.??
?That means that anyone stepping into leadership roles in public (and to a lesser extent private) bureaucracies, you should really understand what your real job is.??
?What is a Bureaucracy for??
The role of the public bureaucracy is not to be efficient ...
no matter how much we might wish it was.??
The role of the public bureaucracy is to manifest our collective values in the world.
Public bureaucracies exist to make real (manifest) what we as a society believe is important, both in terms of what gets done and, critically, how it gets done.??
The most efficient way to get a public pool built is to ask your friend, John, to get some mates together and build it. There are so many problems with this because we believe that values like equity, justice, probity and public accountability are important… much more important than efficiency!?
In fact, efficiency is so far down the values hierarchy that the entire structure of our political and administrative structure is designed to be inefficient to protect what we feel are higher-order values.
We have layers of checks and balances in place to make sure the right people get to have a say; that everyone knows where and how the money was spent and; that the less-powerful segments of society have influence on outcomes.
The US political system is famous for having three co-equal arms of government (Executive, Legislative and Judicial), each of more-or-less equal power. THREE equally powerful sources of authority… how profoundly inefficient is that! No private company would countenance three co-equal heads and yet it’s been the most successful political model for over three centuries. The challenges this model faces only reinforce how important it is that we ensure no-ONE is in solely charge of our society.?
The values a bureaucracy manifest largely reflect what society wants… and that’s not always pretty. For example, genocide (the destruction of an entire culture/ethnic group) was impossible before the invention of bureaucracy but that only reinforces the point that bureaucracies are tools for manifesting particular values in the world.
How do they do this??
Through control.?
Bureaucracies work through the deliberate and structured application of processes that aim to control what happens. That’s why they are endlessly expanding… because reality is inherently uncontrollable.??
The paradox of bureaucracy is that the more you try to control something, the tighter the grip, and the more you crush what you are trying to protect.?
?We use this model to explain the critical point we find ourselves in public agencies where the complexity of the problems we are confronting is outstripping our organizational capacity to respond. It’s the?paradox of government:?
The leap in accountability that determines which way our institutions break (up or down) is something I talk a lot about in my programs, and it ultimately comes down the people who lead them… ie. You! (you can read more about that in my white paper “Protecting the Bureaucratic Soul”... you can request it HERE).?
To make that leap you need to be clear-eyed and realistic about what you are dealing with.?
Making the Leap: dealing with the Psychopath?
In my programs, I run a section called “The Psychopathic Enterprise” where I guide people through the questions about what bureaucracies are for and how they operate.??
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Essentially, what we explore is that all bureaucracies essentially replicate the features of a psychopathic personality.
Bureaucracies only recognize the surface of things, never the interior and the experience of things. Everyone and everything is a tool, a cog in the wheel. Everything and everyone is replaceable because nothing and no one is a complete picture, they are only recognized for their functionality in relation to the goal. What's more, bureaucracies' one overriding goal is to protect themselves. Like all good psychopaths, no other goal is as important as that and no cost is too high to achieve it. Never forget that!?
We try to humanize bureaucracies, and we should, but we need to recognize the reality of the environment we work in and built protected spaces where people can be human, because the bureaucratic process can never be... ?
Bureaucracy crushes the innovation and creativity we need to flourish as a society because it is oriented to control and control is the antithesis of creativity and innovation.?
The Bureaucratic Leader: transforming the shit?
So, that brings us back to you and the real function of the bureaucratic leader.?
Your job is to protect people so they can get on doing theirs.
Your job is to protect them from the machine you all work in so they can be fully human, creative, inspired, passionate, and generous. The machine serves a purpose: it gets stuff done by leveraging the power of hierarchy. Your job is to build micro-cultures where people can work like they are not in a bureaucracy and mobilize the extraordinary functional, institutional, and symbolic power their institutions afford them to do things that manifest the best of what we are striving for as a society (if you want to learn about the organising principal we use here, READ THIS)
A participant in one of my programs said it beautifully the other day:?
?Our job is to transform the shit into love?
?That’s the real work.??
?To do that you must personally embody those values you work in bureaucracy to manifest: equity, justice, and fairness or, as the French put it so eloquently nearly 250 years ago in their little revolution:?Equality, Liberty, Fraternity?
Every great leader in a bureaucray is a hidden revolutionary. Just scratch the surface and you’ll find it.??
If you want to explore the role of the revolutionary in the modern (metamodern) institution,?have read of THIS.?
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