Been said many ways wha happens as teams and orgs scale up in size but this is as good a way to explain it as I’ve seen.
www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerr...
The point of bureaucracy though is to make the mission driven folks optional. The real issue I see is that we tend to think of systems as static — we get it set up right, and it will take care of itself. Real people love in dynamic systems, though, and we need to get better at dealing with that.
One of the most enlightening books I’ve ever read early in my career was a fairly dull tome about “organization design”. One particular chapter/passage really hit me as an engineer:
Suppose there’s a company with a central office and a bunch of branches. You can make policy at the central office, or you can let each branch make their own calls.
Obvious pluses and minuses to each. Central decision-making let you consolidate best practices learned across a much greater data set, and you can invest more in analysis. Locally-made decisions are more responsive to changes, and let you experiment with a range of choices.
A subcategory of the second group consider themselves the institution, and will defend it (themselves) with little regard for the actual interests of the institution, much less the mission.
