Efficiency requires habits. Habits
make sleepy. Sleepiness lessens initiative, makes us forget our goals, and
blurs our perception of the environment. We need habits, but habits entrap us.
In organizations we need to know what to expect from others and what they
expect from us. Thus, we find a greater need for habits, now called customs or,
with a grand intellectual gesture, ‘culture’.
The
zeal and fire to produce good results is tempered by the cool, humid blankets
of caution and anxiety over preventing bad results. Within organizations we are
apt to become turtles: the drive to defend ourselves usually wins over the
drive to stick our necks out. When no one sticks his neck out, sticking our own
neck out exposes others as do-nothings. Most people do not like such exposure,
so our fellow-turtles discourage us. Such reactions and other human weaknesses
produce the natural conspiracy of organizational sclerosis called bureaucracy.
The
world is not as dark as all that. People also like to do things, to make others
happy, to meet challenges, to learn new skills, to be proud of accomplishments,
to take risks. Still, enough bureaucracy exists to make many people believe
that organizational sclerosis is the normal human condition.
Organizations
may have their evils, but organizations are necessary in modern societies. The
number of organizations has increased greatly, and thus bureaucracy has
increased. Any social policy, any political choice, passes through many
political organizations before it is decided, and will then be executed by
government organizations. This world we are talking about is the world of ‘political
bureaucracies’. The characteristic dynamics of this world, well described by
writers such as Graham Allison and Morton Halperin, give political
bureaucracy a perniciously stable character. All of our social and political
management is done largely by institutions that are themselves highly unmanageable.
It is nice to know how and why these institutions are unmanageable, if only so
that we can make the best of it. People who work in these institutions may be
full of goodwill. Their work is, after all, a game of ‘Yes, Minister’. But
goodwill is not enough.
Time and again, someone discovers that a
particular institution has become counterproductive: churches discourage
religion, hospitals discourage healing, the justice system produces injustice,
schools discourage learning. The common response to such a discovery is to
preach abolition of the institution: away with priests, with doctors, with
lawyers or with teachers. Peter Drucker has offered the right answer to such
preaching:
‘A
growing number of critics, especially among the disenchanted liberals of yesterday,
have come to the conclusion that service institutions are inherently unmanageable
and incapable of performance. The most radical expression of this conclusion is
the demand to deschool society, first voiced by the former priest Ivan Illich,
and most clearly presented by the teacher and educational critic John Holt.
Schools, Illich and Holt agree, cannot perform and cannot be made to perform.
If only schools were abolished, children would learn. This is, of course,
another ‘noble savage’ fantasy. Society was ‘deschooled’ not so long ago - not
much more than a century ago. We have ample documents from this preschool era,
e.g., the copious investigations into the life and development of children in
early Victorian England, or in mid-nineteenth-century Germany. There is
precious little support in these documents for the belief that children will
become creative and learn by themselves if only they are not subjected to the
mismanagement of the school. Schools at all levels do indeed need drastic
changes. But what we need is not a ‘non-school’, but a properly functioning and
properly managed learning institution.’
Still, most institutions are
difficult to manage properly. Bureaucracy is the most common, most unassuming,
almost amicable sphinx - that slips into a nightmarish, Kafkaesque world in
which angels fear to tread.
To
understand bureaucracy, we need to know ‘the first law of Parkinson: ‘Work
expands so as to fill the time available for its completion’. That seems
bad, but usually reality is worse. Work expands so as to transcend the time
available until it produces a backlog of unfinished work that creates a balance
between self-importance and self-pity. Always a backlog emerges, a backlog that
proves the department or organization to be somewhat overworked and somewhat
underequipped. Add to this the common knowledge that the quantity of our subordinates
measures our importance, and we understand the tendency of every organization
to grow.
The
ambition to make a profit counteracts this tendency, but whenever the profit
motive is less acute (because ownership is not very vocal, or money is made too
easily), the law of Parkinson works. In government agencies the profit motive
is lacking, so there this law works more readily. Even in the period of huge
government deficits, the law of Parkinson became difficult to neutralize.
Instead of bringing deficits down, most governments were satisfied to let them
grow more slowly, or even to let them grow more slowly than expected.
As
an organization grows, coordination and communication problems grow more quickly.
A cynic with a mathematical bent once estimated that, reckoning with common bureaucracy,
any organization reaches a critical mass around 800 people. Once it has reached
this size it no longer needs an environment, but can fully absorb itself in its
own workings.
As a management consultant I have
seen many organizations in which an internal survey of problems did not include
any item related to the outside world, such as clients or a public to be
served. Worse, organizations tend to solve these internal problems by creating
coordinators until those coordinators in their turn have to be coordinated. Or
new committees are established without abolishing the old ones.
Today
I heard about a government agency of 3500 people with an entirely operational
task, that employed 700 external consultants. Another example, an agency of
3000 people, had 100-odd ‘organization development projects’ in progress,
without any manager having the faintest idea what progress, if any, was being
made, or even what was being done. Another agency that had an exclusive operational
character and appeared permanently overburdened and understaffed had, after
much resistance, its use of time analyzed. This organization spent less than
20% of its time in activities directly related to the mission of that
organization. The biggest item, one that took 12% of all time spent, was that
of personal care and hygiene. This organization’s employees must have been the
best-groomed personnel in the Northern hemisphere, although no outsider could
tell the difference. People who hold a vestige of decency and common sense feel
- once again - like Alice in Wonderland.
A second dynamic is the ‘iron law of
Michels’, a German sociologist from before World War I. When an elite segment
of society enjoys privileges, excluded or exploited people protest. Workers,
for instance, demand better working conditions and higher rewards, and organize
themselves into trade unions and labor parties. Labor representatives in the
trade unions and in politics then become part of the establishment and thus
form a new elite by themselves. Even if this law is not as ironclad as Michels
wants us to have it, and even when meanwhile some sensible results are
produced, the tendency that he describes does exist. It inhibits effective
corrective actions and adds to the unmanageability of our systems.
A third dynamic complicates and
impairs the effectiveness of government bureaucracies. This dynamic is the
growing political affiliation within bureaucratic networks. German sociologist
Helmut Schelsky has pointed out that within bureaucratic networks there emerge
people whom he calls ‘officials.’ These individuals stand for special interests
(of their organizations or of a specific constituency - and always of
themselves). They create personal networks to increase their own power behind
the scenes, and their own status in the limelight. Usually these networks
involve both private and public sectors. This activity creates ‘corporatism’,
that modern hybrid between democracy, bureaucracy and oligarchy.
Fourth is the inherent
traditionalism of bureaucracy. An analysis of the lack of innovation in police
forces in the U.S. found the main reason to be that the only people who rose to
the top were those who fit the existing organizational mode. In a bureaucratic
organization those who fit the existing mode are the bureaucratic people who
solve problems by bureaucratic rules and promote people after their own image.
Then
there is the conservatism of past success. The best example can be found in
armies during times of peace. The people at the top maintain ideas of warfare
from the last war, or even worse, from the war before the last one. When people
persist in outdated success formulas, someone who is less traditional, more
practical, not hindered by preconceptions, may finish them off. Arnold Toynbee
called this the ‘David and Goliath’ pattern. Almost every military innovation
has been opposed for a long time by the sitting generals, and has broken
through only when the previous generation retired or was set aside during a war
because of glaring incompetence. Wars are escalating events. Violence calls for
violence. Though less strongly than Von Clausewitz assumed, any war tends to
lead to total war. Only in losing combat does war exhibit feedback. This, by
the way, is exactly why bureaucratic and political organizations shirk true action
- they do not wish to risk outright failure.
Apart from the ineffectiveness of
bureaucracies that have to execute political decisions, political life itself
exhibits feed-forward loops. Most of these loops are related to the role of
expectations. Take inflation, which has many causes. One important factor in
the worldwide inflation of the 70s was the Vietnam War. A nation may finance a
war in three ways. It may loan to the hilt - which may lead to losing the war
after winning it, as happened in Great Britain after 1945. A nation may
increase taxes, or it may reduce other government expenses. The American
government felt for none of this. They went for the classic fourth way -
printing more money. Dollars are an international currency, and so the world
became filled with devalued dollars. Other countries paid for the Vietnam War
with their own dollar balances.
When
the value of money lessens, prices rise. When this cycle persists for some
time, people expect inflation to continue and this expectation may be a main
reason that inflation does continue. If there is one thing that stimulates
inflation, it is the expectation of inflation.
There are many other examples of the
feed-forward loop of expectations, and not all are bad. When we become somewhat
richer every year, we expect to grow richer the next year as well, so we spend
more, buy more on credit. Demand for goods and services increases, companies
invest more and hire more people, and everything looks sunny. People invest
because they have faith in the future. Many other reasons may exist for such
optimism, but optimism is also an attitude, pure and simple.
Greater
investment creates an even more favorable investment climate. Here, too, is a
positive spiral. Why have Singapore and Taiwan for so long remained on top of
the list of growing countries? Among other things, because these countries
grew. Workers in Singapore and Taiwan may earn less than workers in the United
States, for example, but they compare earnings now with earnings last year and
expect that next year they will earn still more. This expectation feeds forward
in their commitment to working harder, producing more, investing more. Faith in
the future becomes a potent driving force toward an attractive future.
Our
time has seen ‘the revolution of rising expectations’, something with which not
only the rich West, but all developing countries have been blessed. Drucker
again:
‘Affluence,
for instance, everybody ‘knew’ (and many still believe) would greatly reduce
the demand for economic performance. Once we knew how to produce material
goods, the demand on the economic function in society would surely lessen. Instead
we are confronted with a rising tide of human expectations. When President
Kennedy coined this phrase in the early sixties, he had in mind the explosive
growth of demands for economic rewards and satisfactions on the part of the
poor, the underdeveloped countries of the world. But affluence has released a
similar rising tide of human expectations among the remaining poor of the developed
countries, whether American Negro or Sicilian peasant. And the affluent
themselves are escalating their demands for economic performance faster than
their own capacity to perform. The educated young people, contrary to the
headlines in the popular press, show little sign of diminished demand for the
traditional economic goods and services. They show, in addition, an insatiable
appetite for new services and new satisfactions - for education, for health
care, for housing, or for leisure. Equally new, and perhaps even more costly,
is the demand for a clean environment. It too was a luxury until now. That the
masses of yesterday, in city slum or sharecropper’s shanty, enjoyed clean air,
clean streets, safe water, and wholesome unadulterated food is nostalgic delusion.’
The decolonized countries, after
getting rid of the whites, planned to achieve these goals themselves. Many such
countries, especially those in Africa, have instead moved backward, and this
fact has fueled a ‘revolution of rising frustrations.’ This pattern applies
also, but less strongly, to Arabian countries. It explains part of the Islamic
revival. Among the Believers by V.S.
Naipaul supports this view.
Social
disappointment provides a breeding ground for fascism and anarchism. Judging
from the last decades, any possible mass violence will, at least in the West,
probably be less fascist and more anarchistic than any violence that emerged
last time. Developing countries might be more prone to fascism, however, most
likely with overtones of religious and sometimes racist fanaticism.
The
revolution of rising expectations existed from the end of World War II until
the first petroleum crisis. The rise of unfulfilled expectations created a
revolution of rising frustrations from about 1965 until 1985. Such a pattern
formed a dialectic response, as Marxists (and Hegelians) would say, but not a
feedback. This frustration continues to accept the same myth that the state
exists to solve our problems. With the permissiveness that followed prosperity,
this myth resulted during the last twenty years in growing protests and civil
disobedience.
Expectations
tend to feed forward when real satisfaction is lacking. An expectation of more
money next year appears fine, but before we know it we spend more money, always
a little too much. We never feel content, because we quickly become accustomed
to what we have, while our expectations remain ahead of reality. Every
satisfaction that we become accustomed to enjoying we take for granted, and
then we want more. Spoiled children lack this kind of feedback.
Still,
this type of expectation is based on experience, and may hold when conditions
and trends remain the same. Stable experiences of growing prosperity or
grinding poverty both exhibit feed-forward. Prosperity makes for a positive
spiral and poverty for a negative spiral, from the point of personal capital
and personal efforts.
Unrealistic
expectations do not exhibit feed-forward, but they hinder feedback. Such
expectations may be overoptimistic or overpessimistic. They may also be
infantile, neurotic or hysterical. Optimistic infantile expectations are based
on wishes. ‘Wishful thinking’ is the common expression. Pessimistic infantile
thinking is based on fears. ‘Fearful thinking’ would be the opposite of wishful
thinking.
Infantile
expectations tend to be optimistic, but these expectations lack common sense
and are unrelated to actual conditions. By contrast, neurotic expectations
provide an escape from personal frustration or personal failure, by assuming
that everything will be fine or that everything is bad anyway. Neurotic
expectations tend to be pessimistic to mask personal failure or impotence.
Hysterical expectations may also be overly optimistic or overly pessimistic.
But such expectations are based on an inflated ego, as if we ourselves are
responsible for the great or the terrible things that happen.
Much
advertising appeals to the wishful thinker in us. Politics, especially populist
politics, appeal to wishful thinking, but even more to fearful thinking.
Imagine the horrible things that will happen if you vote for the wrong party!
Hysterical expectations are, if not the soul, then at least the specter of
stock markets. Such expectations are also common in successful companies that
explain success in growth markets as being of their own making, just as surfers
congratulate themselves with the fine surf they are making. Real entrepreneurs
exist too, but only in the real world.
All
make-believe and unrealistic expectations impair feedback, because such
expectations make people look for feelings instead of facts. When facts that
stare us in the face are no longer explained away, but are simply ignored, we
approach a state of hallucination. A common trick of stage hypnotists is to
make their subjects see what is not there (positive hallucination), or making
them not see what is there (negative hallucination). When this happens in politics,
we have the full-blown folly that Barbara Tuchman explored.
Both
marketing and politics revolve around expectation engineering and commitment engineering.
Commercial people are the wizards, and politicians the sorcerers. Among the
sorcerers are black magicians, conjuring up visions of envy, contempt, fear,
hate. Many sorcerers and would-be sorcerers eventually discover that they have
conjured up more than they can handle. They are soon caught or swept away by
the forces they themselves unleashed. One common variety of this magic is
campaign promises turned sour.
Politics
in a populist society stirs up public expectations. Creating public
self-confidence and faith in the future is white magic, and mobilizing hate and
fear is black magic. The usual electoral promises sound more as if the
candidate is playing Father Christmas - offering infantile magic. Stirring up expectations
is a boy’s job, but fulfilling expectations is a man’s job - though also girls
stir up expectations that only women may fulfill. The Coué prescription for
society as a whole is something that we have not found thus far, though Ronald
Reagan did his best.
Optimism
and pessimism, even if unfounded, create true feed-forward. All expectations of
the future tend to be self-reinforcing: optimism stimulates action and so produces
more good news, while pessimism represses action and so produces more bad news.
The financial world is especially full of interconnections, all abundantly
looping. Many such interconnections involve expectations.
Economists
debate whether the money supply should increase or decrease, or whether a wage
revision would be wise. These factors play a part, but many other factors are
less tangible ones, at least for economists. Many causes of economic ascent and
decline lie outside the scope of classic economics. Therefore, economic
policies often deal only with symptoms.
Since
expectation engineering is really sorcery, banks and insurance companies are,
as are political organizations, more akin to churches than to proper business
enterprises. Bankers, like public relations people, politicians and parsons,
dress and behave so as to exude trust, though for different constituencies. How
car makers dress and behave is less important, as long as they produce
attractive cars for attractive prices - although they have to dress up when
meeting with bankers and congressmen.
Many people mistakenly believe that
in the past the world was a better place. Today appears more difficult than yesterday,
because satisfaction from improvement has been swallowed up by dissatisfaction
from increased expectations. Although we are better off than we were yesterday,
we enjoy it less. Many problems in society that once we accepted as facts we
now see as glaring failures. When government does twice as much, we can feel
twice as discontented. The expectation that government is there to solve all
our problems has taken the joy out of the welfare state.
We
are right in the idea, with us since the Enlightenment, that society can be
improved, but we tend to expect too much. We cannot solve every problem through
government intervention, and it is questionable if we should try. Many things,
particularly in a democracy, a government can influence only marginally. Social
democrats tend to forget this, and ask the government to change what people
think and do.
You
pay your doctor to do something about your ailments, to check and advise you,
and to write out prescriptions. Some people remain ill because they continue
smoking, drinking, using drugs, or exposing themselves to contamination. It is
not the job of a doctor to change people’s ways. The doctor’s job is to inform
and advise, period. No one is out there to see to our proper attitudes - no
doctor, no state, no wise councils.
Regulations,
measures, and officials cannot solve all social ills. They may even make them
worse. No government can eliminate the drug problem. Some governments may
either worsen or reduce the problem, but in the end the War on Drugs is sterile
muscle-flexing.
‘Repair
legislation’, laws that are passed to compensate for the lack of effects, and
for the undesired side effects and ill effects of previous laws, comprise about
80% of all new laws in Great Britain and the U.S., according to Wildavsky.
If ever you need an example of feed-forward, repair legislation is it.
Overexpecting citizens, overpromising politicians, and underdelivering
bureaucrats conspire to produce an orgy of regulation in modern countries.
Humanity, Civilization & Politics is available at onlineoriginals.com
