How Organizations Remain Bureaucratic

When people mistake efficiency for effectiveness (means for ends), there is a pointless adherence to the administrative rules (i.e., bureaucracy in its pejorative sense.) To avoid making this mistake, what has to happen in organizations is a cultural change around the reporting requirements, because people will do (and generally restrict their attention to) what they are measured on.

If the measurements are all about either efficient transactions (e.g., in purchasing, staffing) without reference to context and objectives, or an assessment of the value of the objectives, then nothing has been measured. How can you measure efficiency without some reference to a strategic, big picture, generally not-easily-measured end, especially in public sector and non-profit organizations?

When bureaucratic controls slide from being necessary evils to being just plain counterproductive , something is dreadfully wrong. Controls need to be aligned with goals.

A very crucial element in remedying such a situation is to help people understand that reports are not results, they are just means of getting information, which might be more or less (but is quite often less), helpful to broader planning and information sharing.

A report is information subset covering some aspects of what happened. It is not identical to the concrete events that actually happen. Neverthlesss, some people seem to spend more time bean  counting  than doing, following procedures, rather than innovating, challenging, and leading change. Their efforts need to be undertaken with a view to deep, quality results. Quality and depth of results is important, and that does not mean pulling out an army of accountants immured in a quantophrenic vision of quality control. It means having inspiration, courage, and support to use one's own judgement and discretion in assessing how to best align one's activities with the organization's goals, or even to question the broader social value of the ends being sought.

So it's not just a web of institutional regulations, it's the stifling amount of reportage that is not aligned to anything other than short term means and efficiencies that makes an institution overly bureaucratic (and therefore less efficient). And this adminstrative kind of bureaucracy eventually becomes an entire focus, even a way of life, providing some (i.e., the uninspired and officious) expediencies and a sense of power and accomplishment, having done everything "by the book".

The rest just wither away, eventually.

And thus bureaucracy sustains itself.

Concrete Deliverables: Watch out for Goal Displacement

Burt Perrin, in a report entitled, Implementing the Vision: Addressing Challenges to Results-Focused Management and Budgeting writes,

Goal displacement occurs when indicators become the objective, where the focus is on “meeting the numbers” rather than doing what the program was created to do or improving actual outcomes. Thus it represents the distortion of program activities.

In fact it is conceivable that working to meet number targets may even produce "perverse effects" such as serving those easiest to serve rather than those in most need, or focusing on procedural efficiencies to increase numbers (of transactions, say) rather than improving system efficiencies, which might decrease them. This occurs for two reasons.

First, efficiencies, which numbers measure (more or less accurately), are not goals, but ways of achieving goals. Numbers are not targets, but for tracking. Second, as Perrin notes, "It does not always make sense to attempt to represent a complex initiative by just a very small number of quantitative indicators. There typically is an inverse relationship between what is important and what is easiest to count and to measure."

So as people focus on meeting the numbers and confuse the report for the result, they close off to the complexity of the situation, and actions become skewed to achieving "concrete deliverables" which could be anything but. What do we take to be objective today? Is it the evidence of the senses, all the flux and change that happens in real time? Well, not really! It is rather what can be measured, quantified and counted.

Getting the numbers right is not an easy matter. To count measure and something, you need to have a category or definition, which is a static mental compartment and sorting device. For example, in order to count employees, you first have to establish a category or definition of "employee" for your organization. If your definition of employee changes, your numbers will change, even if nothing "concrete" changes.

So now, the question about what constitutes objectivity moves up a level. How many of the categories and definitions we use are given and natural like mammal and bird and how many are social and historical like person or fiscal year? Many categories may seem self-evident but to what extent is our confidence in our categories due to social and historical factors, including learning, rather than natural ones? Have we arrived at the end of learning? Of course not.

When it comes to precision measurements and results, physics is the archetype. To discover physical laws, physicists have to establish that their results are reproducible. They need to determine what factors need to be controlled and what properties are internal to the phenomena under investigation. When developing tests they carefully articulate operational definitions, which define phenomena in mathematical terms. There is no algorithm or checklist procedure for these activities, and it takes a great deal of skill, knowledge and insight. You might say, there is an “art” to ensuring objectivity.

Scientists in areas such as biology and geology and even some areas of physics, are investigating things where there are innumerable factors that cannot be isolated and controlled. Scientists are beginning to question whether we have been acting as if something is real because it is measurable, rather than the reverse. (See for instance, Robert Laughlin's A Different Universe.) They emphasize the need to think of nature more as a dynamic complex system. This moves the question of what constitutes objectivity up yet another level because it means considering not just how we define something for the purposes of counting instances of it, but how we frame and contextualize it to distinguish relevant from irrelevant factors in understanding how it behaves and changes over time as a part of a system.

If anything is complex, human organizations, and especially public service organizations, are complex. How closely do the auditor's and comptroller's categories ally with those of the organizational or program strategist's? In the public service, how do you know when you have contributed to the public good? rather than burdened your employees with administrivialities and set them on the straight and narrow road to pursuing "concrete deliverables" that are anything but. Is being quantifiable a necessary quality of all worthwhile goals? How realistic is that?