Bureaucracy evolved to enable operations to be scaled as mechanisation started to slowly take over from individual effort in the 1800’s.
It enabled tasks to be allocated, completed, and managed where the expertise resided, rather than one person doing everything. That role remains vitally important to the productivity of the resource investments we all make.
It does not matter if the bureaucracy is a private one, or a public one, they are equally potent at working in their own best interests.
The challenge faced by the bureaucracies that dominate our lives, both private and public, is the advance of digital, and the ability for data to make routine roles redundant. However, the people who lead bureaucracies have not evolved at the same rate. They use the technology as a means of control, and expansion, not as a means to reshape the operations of the bureaucracy and risk doing themselves out of a job.
Not unreasonable, but they miss the essential truth that technology is just a tool, and like all tools requires smart trained people to use them well.
The problem they need to solve is that the disruption that is occurring is making these hierarchies cost heavy, inflexible, and unable to change. As a result, they are being ‘cleaned up’ by the organisations that are evolving without the overhang.
Don’t let yourself be a part of the ‘overhang”
Header cartoon credit: Gapingvoid.com
