The Busting Bureaucracy Hackathon

Phase 3: Ideas for Busting Bureaucracy (Part 1)

Everyone has a voice- but primarily only control over themselves.

By Julian Wilson on June 12, 2022

The essential factor is that the organisational system must be specifically designed to make hierarchies unstable so they can never support entrenched dominance.

It must be accepted that individuals are more or less socially dominant and have more or less anxiety.

The organisational system therefore must not allow these differences to formalise unequal relationships.

The system must deal with certain hot-spots where exploitation can take place- for example it must demand that links to income cannot pass through others in anything but customer/supplier relationships; equipment must be the asset and responsibility of the operator; processes and techniques must be explicit and not hidden; all people must contribute to “shared” costs equally.

A specific example of an organisational constraint is that costs that are shared equally by everyone is a concept that must only be used in exceptional expenses; no one can specialise in “common tasks” and must gain their primary income from legitimate customer/supplier relationships).

First Steps 

It is through exploiting weakness in the organisational system (the system of explicit rules that govern the arrangement) that individuals entrench their dominance thereby gaining control over resources and having a greater power in negotiation/discussion than was ever intended. They become boss by another name.

For example a common trick is for an individual to manoeuvre to do only tasks that have a “common benefit” and then justify a) all their costs should be paid by the community b) their income should be equal to the value-add members and c) they should have dominion over the common assets.
Eventually they become the boss by another name.

Another example based exploitation of common anxiety. In the west we socialise children to have “stranger danger”- in adult hood this often manifests itself in a form of social anxiety. In organisations this can often mean people are very anxious about “sales” type roles that include meeting strangers. The sales role is often dominated by people without this social inhibition and they will justify “commission” beyond their worth. Eventually taking most of the organisational “value-add” in this single activity- and no one dare challenge it because of their anxiety in doing the role, the salesmen become powerful decision makers and benefactors of the greatest reward.
Eventually they become the boss by another name.

You need to register in order to submit a comment.