Too much bureaucracy can stifle growth. On the other hand, too much spontaneity can be just as toxic. Corporate survival depends on finding a balance between the two, says Mark Goodridge

Everyone is extremely busy, yet things still don’t appear to get done. Ask the question ‘why?’ and a host of weakly defined and ill thought-through reasons are given. “They won’t make a decision” or “It’s the bureaucracy,” or some such.

Even in these days of rapid change, bureaucracy still cops the blame. Few would disagree that management demands some order, control and predictability – and that the bureaucratic model (based on Max Weber1) and mass production model (based on Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Scientific Management2), still hold true for many businesses. ‘No surprises’ is a familiar management maxim, but is this just bureaucracy in disguise? At its worst, bureaucracy is associated with slow decision making, faceless people pushing paper with no accountability – endless excuses honed and polished over the years to make you, the customer, feel powerless. It is characterised by infinite numbers of long and tedious meetings with little added value and few outcomes. The result: participants become frustrated or resigned. This is truly toxic. It is these toxin-creating aspects of bureaucracy that we have all been working to eliminate over the years.

In its hey day, however, it was used to describe what was considered to be a highly efficient form of organisation. Bureaucracy was designed to overcome the subjective element in the management practices of the early days of the industrial revolution, and sought to eliminate personal subjugation, nepotism or even cruelty. Bureaucracy was designed as rational management, free from personal prejudice and personal gain. According to Warren Bennis3, the key features of this system of organisation were:

•  A division of labour based on functional specialism;
• A well defined hierarchy of authority;
• A system of rights covering the rights and duties of employees;
• A system of procedures for dealing with work situations;
• Impersonality of interpersonal relations;
• Selection and promotion based on technical competence. 

Although many of us dislike the term ‘bureaucracy’ – mainly because of the negative connotations associated with it – few would doubt that these six principles are any different to those that govern most organisations today. Add the early 20th century notions of scientific management, work measurement and incentives, and you have a recipe for most 21st century organisations.

Yet, several decades of job evaluation have made poor aspects of bureaucracy worse. Job definitions have put far too much emphasis on the tasks involved in each role, rather than emphasising ownership and accountability. This results in ineffective systems, weak performance management and, above all, a culture of blame. The growing complexity of the workplace adds to the problem. There is too great an investment in the current way of working and too much personal ownership in the status quo. Many are good at observing from the stands what should be done; yet few seem to be on the pitch making it happen. The result: slow change.

Many management initiatives have attempted to grapple with the problem under different names. For example, the quality movement emphasised process management, the internal customer and supplier. This has helped many to start to untangle the complexity of many organisations. It has helped us to refocus on the horizontal relationships of who does what for whom – where the customer is the principal focus, not an impressed boss. But even this has not been enough. Business process re-engineering has so often put us back to the early days of mass production, work measurement and the precise specification of every task, which may be fine for programming robots but is less effective in controlling humans. Especially in a fast moving, knowledge-intense world – where people are the business in an increasing number of businesses – formal structures become less important at defining the way people work.

We are on the horns of a dilemma: death from rigidity and bureaucracy on the one hand, or death from incoherence created by too much spontaneity on the other. The question is not one of choosing one or the other, it is about how we can get the right balance between the two. Fall too far one way and we are in concrete, fall too far the other way and we have nothing left that keeps us together because everyone is doing their own thing and coherent collective action become impossible.

Dealing with the incoherence of the fast paced digital world

Why can’t we go back to the experiments of the recent past, call on our entrepreneurial roots where we make up our own rules and operating behaviours; work as a loose network based upon relationships and knowledge, complete a common task, then re-form to deliver the next task? In principle, this seems ideal, but then we are dogged by the dynamics of power. We all seem to strive for personal power, influence, need for position, recognition and, above all, a sense of being in control of our lives. In other words: order, predictability and knowing where you fit in. And that’s when you find old bureaucratic structures creeping in, which despite all the rhetoric to the contrary, are a feature of most modern organisations.

The idea of self-regulating spontaneous teams sounds good but these are hard to see in practice. After the initial enthusiasm has died down, the track record of co-operatives and leaderless teams says it all. Take the fuel protests as an example. For some, they at first heralded a new dawn of organisation – spontaneous, intense, focused – but 60 days later came a dwindling of support. Why? Because the principles of bureaucracy were not there to keep it going. It is so easy, with all the best will in the world, to become incoherent where everyone does their own thing with little to pull them together. The question is: how do we orchestrate them into a compelling customer proposition?

It seems clear that neither one nor the other will do. We need some of the basics of bureaucracy and embrace the innovative and creative, yet chaotic natures of the digital world – in both small and large corporations. If the large corporation is to survive it has to manage both – a tension between the incoherence (created by too much spontaneity) on the one hand and rigidity (created by too much bureaucracy) on the other.

The dilemma: some analysis

We have no magic tricks, but some insights can help us reconcile this dilemma. Rigidity has been promoted by excessive specification in a world, which has already moved on by the time the specifications have been agreed.

What do we mean by specifications?

• Procedures;
• Policies;
• Job descriptions;
• Excessive concern for uniformity – the biggest challenge for staff functions who perpetually believe that order and conformity add value. 

These specifications have evolved from the bureaucratic culture, which was based on the following assumptions:

• That tasks were constant and could be managed for efficiency;
• Staff needed to be told what to do;
• Training was about how to do the task better rather than questioning why the task had to be done at all;
• Above all, the managers knew what needed to be done and therefore could design how it was to be done, issue job instructions and job descriptions. 

In the new world all these assumptions are being challenged. In the knowledge economy:

• Tasks are not known, are changing, and can be best managed through focusing on the required outcome;
• Staff need to know what is required rather than be told how to do it (because, much as we may try, we don’t precisely know);
• Training is about developing individual competency and understanding customer needs;
• The managers don’t know what needs to be done in detail, so their role switches more to creating the environment for the work to be done rather than determining its detail.

The bureaucratic view of organisation places huge emphasis on the task. The new view of organisation places emphasis on outcomes and inputs. This means getting the right people with the right knowledge and competency so that they can work out for themselves how the task needs to be carried out. These outcomes we call accountabilities. Each accountability needs to have an owner so that individuals and teams have the authority to make decisions. It is the outcomes and the measures of those outcomes upon which managers must rely to ascertain progress and activity. The inputs we call competencies and capabilities. These are the hardware, software and humanware, which make up our organisations. Improve our capability and we have the raw material from which competitive positions are created.

Growing complexity and fluidity in business requires greater emphasis on outputs rather than tasks. Paradoxically, to do this, we need to focus on the inputs to create the environment and conditions within which the business thrives and progresses. This means hiring the right people, motivating them and developing them so that they are prepared to be responsible and held accountable.