#168: Bureaucracy Must Die

Good morning dear friends

If you like your art edgy, then you’ll love Dominique Cheminais’ Mr Abaddon of the Hotel Panoptica (in fact you’ll love all her work and the work of Malian painter Famakan Magassa).

If you’re in a more playful mood, you’ll like Nichetto Studio’s Airbloom table lamp, which I discovered thanks to urbane editor Siphiwe Mpye’s wonderful Wanted Magazine’s Design Issue.

/strategy

Today’s strategy section is a little contrarian.

In Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini say “let’s be clear on one thing: bureaucracy must die. We can no longer afford its pernicious side effects. As humankind’s most deeply entrenched social technology, it will be hard to uproot, but that’s OK. You were put on this earth to do something significant, heroic even, and what could be more heroic than creating, at long last, organizations that are fully human?”

Bureaucracy is bewildering. It confounds all of us and yet, it persists.

Hamel and Zanini ask “How is it that in their personal lives, employees can be trusted to buy houses and cars, but at work can’t requisition a $300 office chair without a manager’s approval? If we thought about it for a minute, we’d realize this is stupid. Autonomy correlates with initiative and innovation. Shrink an individual’s freedom and you shrink their enthusiasm and creativity.”

Doesn’t your heart always melt a little for the person charged with enforcing the rules, but who knows it is all farcical, but they need your compliance, or nothing can move?

The person who says, “I know this is crazy, but {INSERT NAME} department insists on it”.

A few years ago, I placed an order with a global e-tailer. Instead of processing one amount, they did multiple transactions. As my phone pinged away with amounts I didn’t recognise, I panicked and canceled my credit card. I received the goods, but the payment was reversed.

I contacted e-tailer, eager to pay but they’d suspended my account. What to do?

“Give us the details of another credit card on your account.”
“There isn’t one, but if you give me access to my account, I will load my new credit card and you can charge that.”
“No sir, your account has been suspended for non-payment, we can’t give you access.”
“I know I owe you money. I’d like to pay. Can I do a bank transfer?”
“No, sir…”
“Well, then how do I pay you?”
“If you give us the details of another card on your account…”

Feel familiar?

I tried to pay for three months, chatted with bots, tried call centres, asked Google. A lifetime of Catholic guilt and the possibility of eternal damnation pushed me on. Every time the same dead-end.

After three months a kind person said “I shouldn’t really do this but…”

He helped me open a parallel account. Of course, there was no way to pay the other account’s bill from that account.

I still owe them the money. I tried and tried but there was no way through the rules.

We all have stories like that, but how many of us turn the mirror on our organisations?

What processes are there because they’re accepted, they’re the convention, but actually, they’re cholesterol slowing the heartbeat of our business?

Still, Hamel and Zanini caution us not to be naïve, just because it’s illogical doesn’t mean it won’t be defended.

Bureaucracy has woven its way into people’s jobs, lives, and identities. It needs to be extracted with care, one strand at a time.

If you think that your business is being suffocated by bureaucracy, take the Bureacratic Mass Index survey. Your results are benchmarked against 10,000 Harvard Business Review readers.

(If Hamel and Zanini’s principles appeal to you, you’ll enjoy Lessons from Michelin

//self

It’s one thing to say excise bureaucracy, but it is so familiar, so part of the landscape that it is often impossible to imagine an alternative to the existing process. Guaranteed people will look at you in horror – “It has always been this way!!!”

We need our imaginations freed.

I like BJ Fogg’s Magic-Wanding Approach. Fogg is the head of the Behaviour Design Unit at Stanford. He knows that we can get stuck in convention and that we need magic to escape.
Think about a process that seems unduly arduous in your business and approach it with your wand:

• What new process could you try just once?
• What other processes might work as well?

Then push them to the extreme. Don’t restrict yourself to convention. Imagine the most radical version of your idea, somewhere in there are the seeds of new possibilities.

Don’t restrict yourself to what is. If your idea needs dragons, and multilingual Martians and an underground network of radical coffee growers, list them. Playfulness will give you possibilities.

And remember, sometimes the most powerful thing is stopping something. What are you currently doing that you could stop?  Here are two examples of how Netflix and Ritz Carlton approached getting rid of time-wasting processes.

Hamel and Zanini designed this useful framework to open yourself to possibility and you can read more about BJ Fogg’s approach to Behaviour Design here.

/// soul

Last week I told you that I had been invited to the Africa in The World Festival. It has the distinction of having two Nobel prize winners among the speakers – Abdulrazak Gurnah and Wole Soyinka – and I read both their acceptance speeches. As promised here are some snippets from Prof Soyinka.

He certainly has never shied away from being contrarian.

In a 2021 New York Times interview, he said “Unfortunately, some of us are not very wise. We know what we ought to do, when we should retire, go and hide out somewhere, live a life of ease. But we don’t take our own advice, do we? It’s a mystery to me.”

His life is testament to using his knowledge and opportunities to expand human freedom.

When he received the Nobel in 1986, the year that both Olaf Palme and Samora Machel were killed, he dedicated his entire speech to insist that the world see the ‘mutant present’ of apartheid. He refused to allow the normalisation of the horrific.

It was an act of extraordinary generosity. He donated the moment of his achievement to bring attention to the plight of others.

He called on the leaders who witnessed his speech to “Sever that cord. By any name, be it Total Sanction, Boycott, Disinvestment, or whatever, sever this umbilical cord and leave this monster of a birth to atrophy and die or to rebuild itself on long-denied humane foundations. Let it collapse, shorn of its external sustenance, let it collapse of its own social disequilibrium, its economic lopsidedness, its war of attrition on its most productive labour”.

He ends his speech reflecting on the accommodations made by former colonies, and he cautions that “accommodation, on the grand or minuscule scale, collective, institutional, or individual, must not be taken as proof of an infinite, uncritical capacity of black patience. They constitute in their own nature, a body of tests, an accumulation of debt, an implicit offer that must be matched by concrete returns. They are the blocks in a suspended bridge begun from one end of a chasm which, whether the builders will it or not, must obey the law of matter and crash down beyond a certain point, settling definitively into the widening chasm of suspicion, frustration, and redoubled hate”.

This is true of any relationship.

Unmet generosity cannot be sustained, gravity demands that beyond a certain point it will crash to the ground.

It is also true that we may not see another’s generosity and so, in a sense, the building of the world means that we need to default to generosity. If we do, we may magically encounter someone else’s bridge-building and open new worlds of possibility for both of us.

Prof Soyinka provides us with a reminder that there are always moments we can use to expand freedom, for ourselves and others.
Grab that magic wand!

All the best

Karl