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Understanding how bureaucracy develops

(dhruvmethi.substack.com)
192 points dhruvmethi | 1 comments | 17 Oct 24 14:32 UTC | HN request time: 0.222s | source
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sevensor ◴[19 Oct 24 18:31 UTC] No.41889622[source]▶
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.”
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1. potato3732842 ◴[21 Oct 24 12:31 UTC] No.41903458[source]▶
Part of the problem is the asymmetry between defined concentrated harm and diffuse hard to quantity loosely spread harm.

It's easy to quantify the harm of any specific failure. It's hard to quantify the harm of incentivizing people who can fly by the seat of their pants (metaphorically and literally) and generally succeed out of an industry and incentivizing button pushers, checklist runners and spreadsheet fillers into an industry. Say nothing of the fact that a bureaucracy built of these people has every incentive not to study it and to find in their own favor if they ever do.