Don’t kill bureaucracy, use it

strategy+business, September 8, 2020

by Theodore Kinni



Photograph by Darren Rowley / EyeEm

Earlier this year, an intriguing tweet from Tom Peters popped up on my phone. “Virtually all the popular improvement ideas — Continuous Improvement, 6-Sigma, MBO [management by objectives], Agile, Brainstorming, Strategic Planning, PPBS [planning, programming, budgeting systems], ZBB [zero-based budgeting] — develop hardening of the arteries, lose their youthful glow, and become one more burdensome, life-sucking bureaucratic practice,” he wrote.

This may sound glib to you. But like many of Peters’s observations, it’s got a strong foundation in reality. If you’ve been around for a while, you know that all sorts of business programs ossify after a few years. It happened with total quality management (TQM) and business process reengineering back in the 1990s. It’s happening with D&I (diversity and inclusion) and holacracy now.

One of Peters’s followers blamed leaders for this phenomenon. But Peters didn’t agree. “My experience is different,” he replied. “All ‘systems’ inevitably calcify, regardless of the leaders. [The] solution is to automatically throw out any such system after, say, 5 years.”

Many companies do exactly that. They deal with the organizational sclerosis that sets in as management programs age by abandoning them for whatever has come along in the meantime. “Forget TQM, let’s do Six Sigma; forget Six Sigma, let’s do Lean.” Often, these moves follow a change in leadership. A new CEO points everyone in a new direction and cuts the old program’s funding. That seems wasteful, at best. Presumably, there were benefits to be had from the program (and almost certainly a substantial amount of money and effort has been expended to establish and maintain it). And then there were none.

But why do improvement programs ossify? Once upon a time, I studied the reasons TQM implementations fail. They included skimpy budgets, ineffectual leaders, spotty managerial support, ill-defined strategies and objectives, poor program and performance measurement, and a lack of training. In other words, a dearth of all the things that bureaucracies are designed to provide. Looking back, I realize that for my analysis of this phenomenon, I could have written, “If you want to embed TQM in your company, you need to build a TQM bureaucracy.”

But that only holds true for implementation. The problem is that once an improvement idea or system becomes established in a large organization, the bureaucracy that successfully established it usually becomes the agent of its ossification. The “center of excellence” gets bloated and dictatorial; new layers of administrative management slow decision making; the flow of work gets jammed up with new tasks and procedures; metrics yield reports that demand managerial attention and sap employee energy... Read the rest here.