Understanding how bureaucracy develops

When you treat every negative outcome as a system failure, the answer is more systems. This is the cost of a blameless culture. There are places where that’s the right answer, especially where a skilled operator is required to operate in an environment beyond their control and deal with emergent problems in short order. Aviation, surgery. Different situations where the cost of failure is lower can afford to operate without the cost of bureaucratic compliance, but often they don’t even nudge the slider towards personal responsibility and it stays at “fully blameless.”

Just one tiny problem: I've played the blame game before. I've worked there. You can't sell me the greener grass on the other side of the road because I've been to the other side of the road and I know the grass there is actually 90% trampled mud and goose shit.

The blame game drives the exact same bureaucratization process, but faster, because all of the most capable and powerful players have a personal incentive to create insulating processes / excuses that prevent them from winding up holding the bag. Everyone in this thread at time of writing is gleefully indulging in wishful thinking about finally being able to hold the team underperformer accountable, but these expectations are unrealistic. Highly productive individuals do not tend to win the blame game because their inclinations are the exact opposite of the winning strategy. The winning strategy is not to be productive, it's to maximize safety margin, which means minimizing responsibility and maximizing barriers to anyone who might ask anything of you. Bureaucracy goes up, not down, and anyone who tries to be productive in this environment gets punished for it.

"Blaming the system" doesn't prevent bureaucracy from accumulating, obviously, but it does prevent it from accumulating in this particular way and for this particular reason.