The Busting Bureaucracy Hackathon

Phase 2: IMAGINING ALTERNATIVES TO THE BUREAUCRATIC MODEL

Answer by sean-schofield on May 16, 2014, 2:53 pm

By Sean Schofield on May 16, 2022
Minimum Viable Company. Imagine if the only answer you ever received to "What business are you in?" was "Learning." Bureaucracy is not simply about control, it is about control to get things right - the same way, every time. Unfortunately, "right" is always contextual, always momentary. So what if instead we designed a system to be great at getting things wrong and fixing them. Take the concept of minimum viable product, and change it to minimum viable team, department, company. The idea is to be masters of learning. If all engines of the organization are geared toward being humble about error and what doesn't work / isn't working (e.g., Engineers Without Borders Failure Report), learning from them, and changing, bureaucracy would at least be a work in progress, and eventually, be smoothed out into something that generates vs. eats value.

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