This idea has become part of my conceptual toolkit for discussing / describing a key failure mode.
(Note: the below part of the comment is from my Facebook comment about the article when it came out.)
There’s a great connection you make to bureaucracy, and it’s definitely worth exploring.
This gives me a good language to discuss something I’ve noted a number of times. I’d posit that selection pressure for bureaucracy limits how stupid the system gets as a function of the best simple alternative, and the difficulty of transitioning to it without turning off the system. This means that for critical systems where there is no incremental pathway to improve, it’s near-permanent even if there are better alternatives—see the US healthcare system. For less critical systems, once an alternative is found, as long as the transition isn’t too long/too expensive, and there are incentives that actually promote efficiency, it will happen. The critical fact is that the incentives need to exist for everyone that is involved—not just the end user. So if bob in accounting doesn’t like the change, unless someone else can induce cooperation (like senior management,) it never happens.
This idea has become part of my conceptual toolkit for discussing / describing a key failure mode.
(Note: the below part of the comment is from my Facebook comment about the article when it came out.)
There’s a great connection you make to bureaucracy, and it’s definitely worth exploring.
This gives me a good language to discuss something I’ve noted a number of times. I’d posit that selection pressure for bureaucracy limits how stupid the system gets as a function of the best simple alternative, and the difficulty of transitioning to it without turning off the system. This means that for critical systems where there is no incremental pathway to improve, it’s near-permanent even if there are better alternatives—see the US healthcare system. For less critical systems, once an alternative is found, as long as the transition isn’t too long/too expensive, and there are incentives that actually promote efficiency, it will happen. The critical fact is that the incentives need to exist for everyone that is involved—not just the end user. So if bob in accounting doesn’t like the change, unless someone else can induce cooperation (like senior management,) it never happens.