Detox for Bureaucrats

As we noted earlier, three-quarters of those who work in large organizations believe bureaucratic cunning is the secret to getting ahead. Does this belief represent reality? Is bureaucratic guile really more important than competence? Or is this is just an excuse that incompetent people use when they miss out on a promotion? Either way, what’s problematic is that people believe this to be true and, presumably, act accordingly. If you’re convinced that only skilled infighters get ahead, you’re likely to emulate their tactics—like the athlete who reluctantly concludes that doping is the only way to claim a medal.

Bureaucracy, as we’ve noted, is a game. It pits contestants against one another in a battle for positional power and the rewards that come with it. We have no problem with competition—unless winning comes at the cost of one’s humanity. Bureaucracy will start to crumble when talented and principled people walk off the playing field; when big-hearted heretics decide to forgo bureaucratic wins for the sake of their own integrity, and for the sake of those who’ve been diminished by bureaucracy. As Harvard professor Marshall Ganz notes, the goal of people who change the world is “not winning the game, but changing the rules.”¹

To learn a new game, you have to unlearn the old one. If you’re a bureaucratic black belt, how do you change reflexive habits? What does detox for bureaucrats look like? Not surprisingly, it looks a lot like other recovery programs. A good place to start is by borrowing an ordinance from Alcoholics Anonymous.

AA’s fourth step calls for a “searching and fearless” moral inventory, for honest, personal stocktaking. In that spirit, anyone who works in an organization needs to ask, “Where have I forfeited my principles for bureaucratic wins? How has bureaucracy made me less human?”

Here’s a simple exercise you can do. Reflect on your actions across the last week or month and ask:

1. DID I SUBTLY UNDERMINE A RIVAL?  In a bureaucracy, power is zero-sum. When a slot opens up, only one person gets promoted. In the battle to move ahead, it’s tempting to discount the contributions of others, or sow doubts about their integrity or competence.
2. DID I HOLD ON TO POWER WHEN I SHOULD HAVE SHARED IT?  In a formal hierarchy, it’s the people who make the big decisions who get paid the big bucks. To justify their superior status, managers must be seen to be making the tough calls. This creates a disincentive to share authority.
3. DID I PAD A BUDGET REQUEST OR EXAGGERATE A BUSINESS CASE?  Resource allocation in a bureaucracy is inflexible and conservative. Budgets often get set a year in advance, and anything that looks risky gets down-rated. Given this, it’s tempting to bid for more resources than you need or overstate the merits of your case.
4. DID I FAKE ENTHUSIASM FOR ONE OF MY BOSS’S IDEAS?  In a bureaucracy, disagreeing with your boss can be a career-limiting move. Hence, individuals often swallow their reservations rather than risk being seen as disloyal.
5. DID I DISREGARD THE HUMAN COSTS OF A DECISION?  If your organization treats people as mere resources, you may be pushed to make decisions that sacrifice trust and relational capital for short-term business gains.
6. DID I PLAY IT SAFE WHEN I SHOULD HAVE BEEN BOLD?  In a bureaucracy, the penalties for screwing up are often bigger than the penalties for sitting on your hands. Given that, it’s tempting to defend timidity as prudence.
7. DID I FAIL TO CHALLENGE A COUNTERPRODUCTIVE POLICY?  It’s easier to whine about a stupid rule than to challenge a senior policy maker. Civil disobedience is never the safest choice, but systems don’t change until people take a stand.
8. DID I DO LESS THAN I COULD TO FOSTER THE GROWTH OF THOSE WHO WORK FOR ME?  As we noted earlier, there’s often an assumption that “commodity jobs” are filled with “commodity people.” As a result, it’s easy to overlook opportunities to nurture the growth of employees doing mundane jobs.
9. DID I FAIL TO CREATE TIME AND SPACE FOR INNOVATION, OR MISS AN OPPORTUNITY TO BACK A PROMISING IDEA?  There’s not much glory in being an innovation mentor. It takes time and often ends in failure. It’s easier to keep your head down than to champion a new idea, but the result is inertia and incrementalism.
10. DID I FAVOR MY TEAM AT THE EXPENSE OF THE BUSINESS OVERALL?   Bureaucracies offer few rewards for sharing scarce resources with other units. Behaving parochially often produces the best personal outcomes, even when it’s suboptimal for the organization at large.
11. DID I UNFAIRLY DEFLECT BLAME OR CLAIM CREDIT?  In a bureaucracy, performance assessments are typically focused on individuals rather than teams. The goal is to be Teflon when the shit hits the fan and Velcro when plaudits are being handed out. This behavior distorts reputations and misallocates rewards, but it’s the way to win in an individualistic organization.
12. DID I SACRIFICE MY VALUES FOR EXPEDIENCY?  Bureaucracies value results above all else. If you exceed your targets, no one’s likely to ask what shortcuts you took. Over time, the bias for outcomes over ethics desensitizes an organization to the moral consequences of its actions.

Set aside some time and work through these questions. Get a journal or create a spreadsheet. Can you recall times when you behaved more like a bureaucrat rather than a human being? What was the trigger? How might you reduce the chances of being triggered in the future? In our experience, there’s value in making this a weekly exercise. If you approach this task seriously, your colleagues will soon notice the change. You will become more generous, considerate, and approachable, and in consequence, more effective.

Transformation is never a solo endeavor. You’re going to need accountability partners. Reach out to three or four trusted peers and talk to them about your desire to become a post-bureaucratic leader. Share your personal inventory with them and invite them to do the same. Brainstorm ways of living bureaucracy-free and arrange regular check-ins to share progress.

When you’re ready, circulate the detox questions to the people who work for you. Ask them, “When have you seen me acting like a bureaucrat rather than a mentor or an advocate? What should I have done differently?” Ask people to write down their feedback and bring it to a staff meeting. Pass the comments around and have each person share a piece of feedback contributed by one of their colleagues. This will keep the process anonymous and give everyone the chance to be heard. Make this a monthly or quarterly exercise. Over time, team members will gain the courage to call you out when they see you slipping back into bureaucratic habits.

As you become more comfortable in your post-bureaucratic skin, you and your support group can start to share your experiences more broadly. Invite more of your peers to join the discussion, write a blog, talk about what you’ve learned. Most of your colleagues will applaud you for your integrity and authenticity—“I’m Karl, and I’m a recovering bureaucrat.” By taking accountability for your share of the problem, you encourage others to do the same. Moral courage is contagious.

There’s an adage, variously attributed to Winston Churchill, Marshall McLuhan, and Father John Culkin, that “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” This is true of every human invention—from cuneiform tablets to smartphones, from the wheel to self-driving vehicles, and from algebra to machine learning. A century and a half ago, human beings hammered out the basic structures of industrial-scale bureaucracy, and ever since, bureaucracy has been hammering the humanity out of us. But we’re not helpless. We can push back when we feel our souls are being beaten into shapes that make us less than fully human. That’s the first step on the journey to humanocracy.

Giving Power Away

The pursuit of humanocracy is inherently sacrificial. Mary Parker Follett, the early twentieth-century management guru, argued that “leadership is not defined by the exercise of power but by the capacity to increase the sense of power among those led.” As a rebuke to bureaucratic power mongers, this is nearly as radical as Christ’s proclamation that the first shall be last. It’s here we find the beating heart of humanocracy—in the selfless desire to help others accomplish more than they would have thought possible.

This is the ethos behind Zhang’s vision of Haier as a squadron of dragons. It’s why Southwest Airlines celebrates a “servant’s heart.” It’s what prompts a Nucor plant manager to proclaim that “We value every single job, every single position, every single person, but being a manager is the least noble job.”

If you’re a manager of any sort, you can’t empower others without surrendering some of your own positional authority. You have to trade in the old currency of power—perks, decision rights, and sanctions—for new coinage—wisdom, generosity, and mentorship.

A good first step is to ask those who work for you, “What am I doing that feels like interference, or adds no value?” Fearing repercussions, they may at first be hesitant to give direct feedback. If so, be patient. It may take several tries before they trust you enough to unload. Next, ask, “What am I doing that you could do better?” If they’re unclear about what it is you do, have team members shadow you for a few days, like Olivier Duplain in Michelin’s Le Puy factory (see chapter 14).

There are many ways you can begin syndicating the work of managing to your team. Here are a few.

Hacking Management

You can’t demolish bureaucracy with a giant wrecking ball or a stick of dynamite. Instead, it must be dismantled, brick by brick. Detox and delegation are the first steps, but then what? Obviously it’s not enough to change yourself and your team. Ultimately, you have to change the core processes by which your company is run—planning, resource allocation, project management, product development, performance assessment, promotion, compensation, hiring, training, and all the rest. Each of these processes must be rebuilt atop the principles of humanocracy.

Complex systems, like a human organism or a vibrant city, aren’t built top-down. They have to be assembled bottom-up through trial and error. No small group of senior staffers or consultants has the imagination or wisdom to design a fully functioning post-bureaucratic Arcadia. This might be different if dozens of companies had already made the shift to humanocracy, but that’s not the case. There’s no step-by-step manual for building a humanocracy. It’s not like moving an IT system into the cloud, rolling out a self-serve HR portal, or rebranding project managers as “scrum masters.”

By definition, humanocracy is a radical departure from the status quo. Yet in building it, we have to be careful not to throw a giant wrench into the clanking machinery of bureaucracy. What’s required is an approach that is both revolutionary and evolutionary; that’s radical in its aspirations yet pragmatic in its approach. In practice, this means running lots of experiments—this is how human beings test whacky ideas without blowing things up. Before sending an astronaut into space, we launch a monkey or two. Before putting a new drug on the market, we test it on rats. Luckily, in the case of humanocracy, no animal testing is required—unless, of course, you count us.

Solving a complex and novel challenge—like carbon capture or autonomous vehicles—requires lots of experimentation. Building human-centric organizations is no different. It’s no accident that Ballarin launched dozens of experiments at Michelin, not one or two.

If you’re a team leader, middle manager, or even a VP, it’s easy to believe that someone else should take the lead in busting bureaucracy. But what if they don’t? The good news is that anyone can be a management renegade, and every team can be a laboratory.

The secret is to think like a hacker—not the ones who steal your credit card data, but the ones who post brilliant bits of code on GitHub. Hackers don’t wait to be asked. They don’t think, “That’s someone else’s problem.” Instead, they take the initiative. They act as if they have permission, whether they do or not. The term “hacker” first came to prominence in the 1990s as a label for renegade coders who were committed to undermining the hegemony of Microsoft and other software giants by producing free, community-authored software. Linus Torvalds, the world’s most famous hacker, released the first version of Linux in 1991 and invited other hackers to make it better. Today, Linux encompasses more than 26 million lines of code, assembled by more than sixteen thousand contributors.

Could rebel hackers have the same dramatic impact on management they’ve had on software? Yep—but only if they sign up to the hacker ethos. Eric Raymond, author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, the classic treatise on open source software, identifies five beliefs that define a hacker:²

1.  The world is full of fascinating problems to be solved.

To be a hacker you have to get a basic thrill from solving problems, sharpening your skills, and exercising your intelligence. You also have to develop a kind of faith in your own learning capacity—a belief that even though you may not know all of what you need to solve a problem, if you tackle just a piece of it and learn from that, you’ll learn enough to solve the next piece—and so on, until you’re done.

2.  No problem should ever have to be solved twice.

To behave like a hacker, you have to believe that the thinking time of other hackers is precious—so much so that it’s almost a moral duty for you to share information, solve problems, and then give the solutions away just so other hackers can solve new problems instead of having to perpetually re-address old ones.

3.  Boredom and drudgery [and bureaucracy] are evil.

Hackers (and creative people in general) should never be bored or have to drudge at stupid repetitive work, because when this happens it means they aren’t doing what only they can do—solve new problems. This wastefulness hurts everybody. Therefore boredom and drudgery are not just unpleasant but actually evil.

4.  Freedom is good.

Hackers are naturally anti-authoritarian. Anyone who can give you orders can stop you from solving whatever problem you’re being fascinated by—and, given the way authoritarian minds work, will generally find some appallingly stupid reason to do so. So the authoritarian attitude has to be fought wherever you find it, lest it smother you and other hackers.

5.  Attitude is no substitute for competence.

To be a hacker, you have to develop some of these attitudes. But copping an attitude alone won’t make you a hacker, any more than it will make you a champion athlete or a rock star. Becoming a hacker will take intelligence, practice, dedication, and hard work. Therefore, you have to learn to distrust attitude and respect competence of every kind.

If this is your creed, congratulations—you’re a hacker. But what, exactly, are you going to hack, and how? What does a management hack look like? Let’s take a few examples.

Building Your Hack

To come up with your own hack, invite your team to a daylong “management jam.” If possible, have colleagues fill out the ten-question bureaucratic mass index survey in advance (go to www.humanocracy.com/BMI, or see appendix A). The results will provide a useful context.

Once together, ask your team to identify the bureaucratic ailments that are the most costly to your organization—the policies or systems that do most to undermine resilience, innovation, and engagement. Specifically, ask them to work through the following three questions:

Question 1: Problems

Where do you feel we may be suffering from “bureausclerosis”—waste, friction, insularity, autocracy, conformity, timidity, politicking, or other related ailments? Pick one malady and be prepared to illustrate how it impairs effectiveness. (Be as concrete as possible.)

Give individuals fifteen minutes to reflect privately on this question before asking them to share their thoughts with the rest of the group. Record everyone’s answer on a whiteboard or capture them digitally and project them on a screen. Spend forty minutes exploring the thinking behind these views. Then, in the last five minutes of the hour, ask the team to pick one ailment to tackle.

Next, ask your team to think about the processes and policies that contribute to that infirmity.

Question 2: Processes and Policies

What management policies or processes—including planning, goal setting, budgeting, staffing, job design, product development, performance management, hiring, promotion, training, development, and compensation—are most to blame for this problem? Pick one process and be prepared to describe how it contributes to the malady.

Again, give individuals fifteen minutes to form their own answer; then spend forty minutes sharing perspectives. Take the last few minutes to agree on a process or policy to hack.

Now move on to the third question.

Question 3: Principles

Which post-bureaucratic principle—ownership, markets, meritocracy, community, openness, experimentation, or paradox—would be the most helpful in overcoming this disorder? Pick one principle and describe how it could be applied in a way that would help counter the negative effects of bureaucracy.

Again, give individuals time to cogitate privately before going around the table. Once everyone’s weighed in, try to converge on one or two principles that would be useful in redressing the bureaucratic shortcoming.

You can also tackle the questions in reverse order. Start by asking, “Which principle of humanocracy could be catalytic in helping us become a more resilient, creative, and empowering organization?” Then ask, “If we were serious about this principle, what processes or policies would we change?” And finally, “What would be the payoff—how, exactly, would this help reduce bureaucratic drag?”

Whatever route you take, the goal is to zero in on a problem, a process, and a principle. For a team of eight to twelve individuals, this is a half-day’s work. After lunch, move on to brainstorming solutions. By this point, most of your colleagues will have a potential hack in mind. Give them forty minutes to flesh out their individual ideas. How, exactly, would they operationalize the chosen principle?

When the team reconvenes, give everyone a few minutes to describe their hack and take questions from the group. Look for overlapping hacks, or hacks that might be pieces of a bigger solution. Once all the hacks are on the table, give everyone a short break. When they reconvene, ask them to select two to three hacks for further development and to then self-organize around their preferred hack. Once in groups, they should spend the next couple of hours working up an experimental design.

Important questions at this stage will include:

1. What’s our proposed solution, in a single sentence?
2. What are the key components of our hack?
3. What hypotheses do we need to test?
4. Who will participate in the experiment?
5. What data will we collect?
6. How do we ensure we get meaningful results?
7. How much time will we need to run the experiment and what resources will be required?

Answers should be captured on a simple, shareable template like the one in table 15-1, which summarizes the travel experiment we described earlier.

Remember, the goal is to test your proposed solutions as efficiently as possible, not build something that’s bomb-proof. Nevertheless, you’ll want to be thoughtful about minimizing risks. A few tips:

1. Keep it simple. Test one or two hypotheses at a time, starting with the most critical.
2. Use volunteers. Don’t compel anyone to take part in your experiment.
3. Make it fun. Think of ways to gamify the experience.
4. Start in your own backyard. That will minimize the number of permissions you need and the risk that someone tells you to stop.
5. Run the new in parallel with the old. Don’t blow up the existing process until you’ve validated the new one.
6. Refine and retest. Create an expectation that this will be the first of many experiments.
7. Stay loyal to the problem. Don’t fall in love with your solution. If it doesn’t pan out, search for other testable hacks.

With no more than a day’s work, your team ought to be able to generate one or two promising hacks. You don’t have to get a top-level sign-off, anticipate every pitfall, work out the entire solution in advance, or convince thousands of individuals to change the way they work. Remember the hacker ethos—start where you are, change what you can, rinse, repeat. (For more help building your hack, visit www.humanocracy.com/hack.) The point is, each of us has agency. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “There are always two parties, the party of the past and the party of the future, the establishment and the movement.” Everyone gets to choose. You can complain about all the bureaucratic bullshit, or pick up a shovel.

Still, the idea that you and your team can hack the system may seem dubious: “Sure, we can run a local experiment, but what’s really going to change? Will anyone notice? This seems like battling a five-alarm fire with a garden hose.” We understand your skepticism, but hang with us. In the final chapter we’re going to show you how to scale up.