It then came up in my (rather popular) post on Robert Conquest’s Three Laws of Politics, in Why Democracy Inevitably Leads to More Bureaucracy, in Five Laws of Human Nature, in Bureaucracies Temporarily Reverse the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and, naturally, in my post called Parkinson’s Law.

He’s most famous for “Parkinson’s Law” concerning the growth of Staff in the Admiralty, but he had lots of other insights.

We do manage to come up with organizations that solve problems and function effectively, on occasion. What we seem to have a problem with is in copying those entities, and in keeping them on track. Almost any organizational entity seems to have a definite life-cycle, whether you’re talking a religious institution like a church, or a military unit — and that life-cycle is somehow a separate thing, made up of the individuals in the organization, yet also entirely separate from them. I’ve been in military units that were dysfunctional on numerous occasions, and what struck me hard when I served in the same outfit twice, separated by years in some cases, was just how much they were still dysfunctional in the same way, despite turnover in personnel that sometimes might have been 100% repeated ten times.

I don’t think anyone pays attention to this stuff, or has really bothered to analyze it, either. Most of what I find out there in regards to published studies of organizational theory strikes me as being so far off base from my personal observations that I can’t take any of it seriously. In a lot of cases, the erudite academic observations I find read as though they were written by an asexual virgin trying to describe and discuss sex as experienced by Hugh Hefner. It’s amazing how little attention is paid to this stuff, and yet how intimately important it is to our daily lives. It’s not just the military where the problem is experienced; every workplace I’ve been in, around, or heard discussed goes through analogous problems, and everyone is made miserable by it. Not to mention, the amount of situational friction that gets added to everyday life by it all…

There has got to be a better way.

There’s a dichotomy; on the one hand, you have the formal structure of a unit, an organization. And, then you have the informal “old boys network” that actually plays a key role in getting things done by circumventing the structural flaws and problems.

In the old Soviet Union, there was a recognized fixture to most organizations–Not the “organization man”, who sat up front and made pretty noises for the bureaucracy, but the “fixer”, who operated in the background in getting things done. I’ve talked to a bunch of people who were around, back then, and it was astounding to hear how they’d known of situations that were short-circuited by these “fixers”, who would find necessary materials, and informally barter services or products to get them. From one informant, I’ve quite gotten the impression that without these people, the whole system would have ground to a halt in very short order.

This leads me to the further speculation that the problem isn’t entirely ideological. Soviet industry, US Army, American corporate business, whatever… The problem is organization, and how we do it. Bureaucracy and hierarchy are pernicious evils, ones that seem to attract the worst people, and then bring out those people’s worst features. And, yet, whenever we encounter a problem, the first impulse we have is “Let’s create a committee, a working group, a new unit…”. Ten years later, we’re looking at an ossified, sclerotic entity that’s doing more active harm, and wondering “How the hell did we get here…?”.

Give you a case in example… Local health district is on a rampage, forcing businesses serving food to comply with food service regulations. One effect is forcing a business that served a continental breakfast to put a commercial kitchen into operation on their grounds. As a part of that, we’ve been doing the construction work, and one of the issues that arose was flooring: Our preferred solution? Paint the bare concrete, and use anti-fatigue kitchen mats as the flooring surface. Only thing is, when the owner tells the inspector about this, he’s informed that no, you can’t use paint.

Cue hours of research with the health department, the state ag people, and God alone knows who else. Now, what I found maddening? The inspector did not have to hand the NSF or ANSI standards that had to be met in order to provide a proper flooring surface. She just “knew” that paint wasn’t it, and kept quoting me generalities about the surface.

After sufficient research, I’m finding a paint product that meets and exceeds USDA standards, and that’s what we’re now using. Now, here’s a government inspector that doesn’t know their own source regulations and standards, and they’re out doing health and safety inspections–But, that’s alright, because construction stuff doesn’t fit into their lane very well, and they just go by the seat of their pants when it comes to evaluating this stuff. No standard, no citable regulation, just the “feeling” that things like a painted floor are unsanitary, for some munging reason…

There’s a reason most contractors drink, and heavily–It’s the government.

Maybe. But it seems to me that even when we try to make artificial software systems flexible w.r.t. changing design needs, that doing so tends to be difficult, and attempting to switch responsibilities from one subsystem to another is a common source of thorny problems. We could try to blame that inflexibility on a characteristically human tunnel vision flaw among the human programmers… but I also don’t get the impression from evolutionary history that impersonal natural selection is all that good at flexibly reassigning roles in the subsystems of the complex system that it is updating. So possibly this is related to some underlying fundamental difficulty in (re)optimizing complex systems to address new tradeoffs, not just a flaw in our nature but some deeper gotcha in the underlying problem being solved, vaguely comparable to the second law of thermodynamics.

None of that is to dispute that our bureaucracies seem to be seriously bad at it or that it is expensive. And we can expect that they are indeed worse at it than they would be if we designed them wisely, rather as a badly designed steam engine can be much more wasteful than thermodynamics requires. But it might not be possible to design them to completely avoid it, or to suppress trends like more complicated organizations suffering more severely from the problem.

It isn’t just the military, either. Go down to your local school district, and you’ll find the same sort of dysfunction — In fact, try any organization bigger than a one-man operation thats been around for more than a few weeks. It is endemic to the human condition, I fear, and represents a flaw in our nature, and one that is going to continue to plague us.

I think that’s a piece of the problem, but I believe ideology is only an expression of a deeper problem, that of hierarchy and rigid structure.

Every failure that I’m talking about here has its roots in the fundamental structure of the organization; the Engineer branch is narrowly focused on their narrow specialty, for example, and loathes the idea of being pulled out of that focus. Part of this is due to budgeting, and the way we assign responsibilities within the greater organization. Anything that is cross-specialty gets short shrift, because it falls in that boundary space between clearly delineated fields and branches. In tactics, we’re taught to seek unit boundaries, in order to take advantage of the “seam of no man’s responsibilities”. You never want to attack a unit directly; far better to dislocate them by infiltrating along a boundary, getting in between them and their flanking unit, and then cause them to withdraw.

Likewise, if you’re determining a strategy, you want to find a seam between responsibilities. An example would be the IED campaign–No one organization or branch was responsible for keeping roads clear, so there was no specific attention focused on that mission. The lines of communications in rear areas are not specifically identified as an area of responsibility for any one branch or unit, and as such, nobody was responsible for keeping the roads clear and safe for operations.

It strikes me that the most successful operations and organizations I’ve personally experienced were all ad-hoc, short-term affairs where they were empowered to solve a particular problem under a specific talented officer or NCO, whose sole focus was dealing with that problem for the duration of that project. Likewise, the worst and least effective operations and organizations all had the common feature of being run by time-servers and a general apathy towards doing their jobs, because they were routine and locked in stone.

I think we need a totally different paradigm for how we organize our military. To some extent, I believe that a better model would be an entrepreneurial one, where specific missions are doled out to officers, who are then expected to build their own organizations from available assets. In the US Army, we’re a very adaptable and extremely flexible organization, to the point where we’re almost always re-inventing the wheel for every mission. That is a feature we should be taking advantage of, instead of making it a contributor to our dysfunction.

I’m a big believer in mission-type orders, and allowing the leadership to solve problems at the lowest level possible. The higher element structures would need to be adapted in order to make something like this work, however. You’d also need a clear set of eyes setting the goals and identifying the issues that need attention given to them.

The organizational straight-jacket that we have wrapped around ourselves is one that we’re going to have to overcome, and I would suggest we do it by doing away with it entirely.

A couple of things struck me, over the years I was on active duty: Very often, the specialty Military Occupational Specialty personnel we were assigned were not worth the powder to blow them up with, but the guys we seconded to those jobs from within the primary specialty of the unit were generally top-notch at getting things done. In other words, the best personnel clerk was often not the guy or girl who was trained by the admin people for the job, but in our case, a combat engineer who was seconded to that job due to shortages. For whatever reason, those personnel were often more diligent and more responsive to dealing with the issues of the other line troops than the dead weight assigned to us from the Adjutant General’s good offices. Likewise, the supply clerk who was supposed to be the unit armorer as well as clerk was almost always found to be doing a much worse job at maintaining the weapons than the kid off the line who was put in the arms room to supplement him.

I’m not fond of the way the US Army has approached a lot of these things–I’m dead set against all these approaches to manpower that treat each and every job like it’s an interchangeable slot that requires a specific cogwheel to fill it. If I were king for a day, and could do it, I’d shut down all those “specialty” MOS-producing schools, and have only a few generalist MOS, with appropriate specialty training for people needed in specific slots. In other words, instead of having a headquarter element with a dozen different specialties in one unit, like communications, supply, maintenance and so forth, you’d have a unit with just one specific MOS, like Infantry or Combat Engineer, and the specialty jobs would be filled with personnel given secondary specialty training in those support jobs that were necessary.

I’d also take a much more entrepreneurial approach to manning, particularly at the senior levels. Unit commanders would need to build their command teams of subordinate leaders before taking command; can’t attract sufficient junior officers or NCOs? That’s what I’d call a “sign” that your leadership has issues; the way we run things these days, the whole thing is very feudal–The commander is assigned by the higher headquarters, and then the people he’s put in charge of have no say in whether or not they want to work for him. This allows a bunch of problems to fester, in that toxic leadership is allowed to flourish, because they can basically treat their subordinates like so many serfs, whose lives are bound to the unit as though they were medieval peasants who were given to the lord with his land… Were a commander forced to actually attract subordinates to his service, he’d have a very hard time hiding his inability to lead from his bosses, which is all too easy under the current system.

People aren’t inanimate spare parts, and the biggest failing of our system is that it treats them as such. This failing is expressed in oh-so-many ways, including the “Not my lane” issues I’ve been railing against in this thread. With a more entrepreneurial approach, a higher commander might have been motivated to actually run some realistic exercises against an imaginative subordinate like my old captain, who would have been able to demonstrate the problems he was trying to solve. Then, the commander would have had an objective demonstration that such a problem existed, and could have “put out for bid” for someone to solve those issues.

The current system relies on someone who got where they are because they are successful time-serving hacks who lacked the imagination to do anything else with their lives, and when they have someone like my old boss approach them with a potential problem, it’s all to easy for them to take the path of least resistance and say “No, that’s not our problem… In fact, that’s not a problem, at all…”.

Which was why we were still putting fucking sandbags into the bottom of our truck cabs in 2003, as improvised armor against mines and IEDs. Something that still enrages me, to this day… I don’t even want to start counting up the lives lost and ruined through injuries that were completely unnecessary, had we but properly prepared ourselves for the entirely predictable hazards of modern warfare.

We all know the problems of Universities and the bubbles they put themselves in. I think a big part of that is the military schools. They only think big because they they as an aristocratic caste are supposed to be that way. So US Navy for example today has no merchants escorts. It is carriers and Burkes.