The Enduring Appeal Of Choking Oneself To Death

Why the organizational equivalent of auto-erotic asphyxiation persists nearly everywhere

Image credit: Father To Go

Bureaucracies are like cancer: a fundamental biological imperative (growth) runs out of control and ends up killing the organism of which it is a part. Without some form of bureaucracy, no organization can exist; too much bureaucracy and no organization can survive for long. It is a conundrum that very few organizations ever manage to grapple with successfully. This is because there are perverse incentives that work to encourage ever-more bureaucracy within an organization. This article will take a look at a few such incentives and we will see their malign effects.

Let’s begin with why bureaucracies exist in the first place.

All organizations have to manage the flow of information that travels within them. Were this management not done, there would be no possibility of coordinated intentional actions. We can liken this to an early city in the twentieth century: there are several major roads that intersect; without placing traffic lights at the intersections and coordinating the operation of these lights, all would be chaos. So the imposition of a few traffic lights at key intersections permits a reasonably coherent flow of traffic, thus enabling the city’s…