Facilitating vs Debilitating Bureaucracy

An authentic and slightly irreverent blog on the applied dimensions of leadership & change...

• My Crap

• Your Crap

• Our Crap

• Everybody’s Crap.

Photo courtesy of @stephanopollio, Unsplash

In our desire to create a consistently reliable (and comfortable) method of obtaining results, we establish a routine, develop a rhythm, set a schedule, solidify a plan, and create the processes, policies, and procedures to ensure those results are obtained and maintained. Our craving for certainly in an uncertain world leads us to exert our compulsion for control. We so intently, so desperately, create ways of obtaining results that we lose sight of how the results we seek to attain have changed from those which our management system—our institution’s bureaucracy—were designed to obtain. We then box ourselves into obsolete thinking that we cannot emotionally bear to change.

We institutionalize dysfunction when our initial intent was to guarantee function. We want to change, to adapt, but we feel stuck, trapped by our own doing. Then our ego kicks in and fills our heads with fear of losing face. How could what used to be so right be so wrong now? How could we make such a mistake? Egad! But we didn’t; you didn’t. We’ve just outgrown the old way and that is a good thing. So how do we turn a debilitating bureaucracy back into a facilitating one? We start by cutting the crap! Here’s how it works…

Expect to grow. This means learn. This means make mistakes.

Forgive yourself your imperfections and use them to better understand your people and their humanity. Show them how to change by doing it yourself, honestly and in front of them. If your approach to creating reliable success is rigid and legalistic you’ve engineered the capacity out of your human resources. This includes yourself.

Expect your people to grow. This means learn. This means make mistakes.

Forgive your people their mistakes and foster their ability to make them…it is the only way real learning happens. Encourage exploration and discover efficiencies and innovations that cannot be predetermined, planned and engineered. Your bureaucracy represents a static world with automatons if it is not living and breathing with the people who design and execute each of its elements. Make it a learning organism, build an input stream into everything you do.

Expect your organization to grow. This means learn. This means make mistakes.

Plan for failure and celebrate its learning. Make it safe to fail, safe to learn, safe to grow. Failure doesn’t mean waste; it isn’t failure or mistakes for their own sake. It is accepting that there are unknowns and then rising up to meet them, as individuals and as an organization. Create Learning From Failure processes and procedures to anchor growth-facilitation into your bureaucracy.

Expect your community to grow. This means learn. This means make mistakes.

Plan for your community to not understand, agree with, or be happy about your choices and actions so you can build in conversations and information-gathering to learn how they see things so you can learn and grow together. Build community input and outreach into your way of doing business.

If your processes, policies and procedures are not actively facilitating learning and growth, they are hindering them. Cut the crap.

© 2019 Stacie L L Morgan. All rights reserved.