Bureaucracy and the static hierarchies that they create have gotten us to where we are. The problem is that their inherent inflexibility and slow adaption rates are rendering them ineffective and irrelevant in the fast-changing world. What’s going to supplant them is unclear, but what is increasingly clear is that the way we do things does not work effectively in modern conditions. I hate use of the word “paradigm”, but that’s what it is–Our reflexive world view and how to deal with problems within it? It’s obsolete, and isn’t working effectively. You can see this happening in regards to the swifter burn rate that a lot of modern companies and organizations demonstrate, going from agile-and-effective to sclerotic-and-ineffective in years, where it classically took generations for that to happen. Hell, the very structures of these things are rapidly exhibiting the same issues. Do corporations, invented during the Renaissance, still make sense…?

Decentralization and “power-down” is the only path that makes sense–You stick people into organizations based on hierarchy and bureaucracy, and they almost instantly take on the inherent characteristics of those meta-organisms. Get a person to look at a problem, as an individual? They’ll see it, agree that it’s a problem, and acknowledge that something needs to be done. But, put them in an office cubicle, and then ask them to, y’know… Actually do something…? Nope; no can do, the “…forces are arrayed against us, we can’t even acknowledge the problem exists…”.

I’ve railed on here, before, about the actual difficulties that I and others encountered in the Army, while trying to get the “system” to acknowledge the likelihood of the IED war, and equipping to deal with it properly. What’s an interesting side note here, and entirely relevant to this discussion? During the course of that, there were numerous Reserve officers who would privately tell me that I was right, but that they couldn’t actually do anything about the issue in their day jobs as civilian Department of the Army employees at the Engineer School, because… Well, just “Because…”. As individuals, they saw the same things I did, and recognized the same implications. As creatures of the corporate whole, however…? They could do nothing, and did nothing until the freight train of reality overwhelmed their flawed corporate view of the world.

Organizations have a separate life, an entirely discrete and separate existence from the lives of the people participating in them. This is something a lot of us refuse to recognize, thinking that “good people” can fix things. Frankly, no. What happens is that “good people” get assigned or hired with these dysfunctional organizations, and then slowly get dragged into the mindset and culture that makes that organization what it is, resulting in them acting out real-world Borg-like assimilation. Seen it happen too many times to enumerate. And, it’s why I’m a proponent of a “corporate death penalty” for organizations like the FBI and others that are guilty of corporate collective misbehavior. The problem is that the guys like Strzok didn’t come out of a vacuum–They were selected, hired, trained, promoted, and then put in charge of things by the organization. The fact that the organization didn’t catch their issues, and deal with them appropriately, at some point along the line? That points to the fact that those individuals like Strzok were not only on board with the organization’s real values and mores, but that they were approved by the rest of the organization–You cannot possibly convince me that Strzok just suddenly woke up one morning, late in the Obama Administration, and turned into the scumbag that he obviously was. Or, that nobody on his left and right flank as a peer or supervisor didn’t know who and what he was–That simply does not happen. A racist cop does not spend twenty years in the locker room or briefing rooms, and not betray his attitudes and behaviors to his or her peers–The idea that “Nobody knew…” is absolutely the rankest BS I’ve ever heard, in nearly all these cases. You cannot mask yourself that well, and these guys like Strzok and the various other creatures of the night? Their peers knew; they approved, if only by failing to actually do something about what they saw these jackasses doing.

We need to find another way of operating and doing business. I don’t know what it is, but I can guarantee you that what we are doing right now ain’t gonna last, or keep working in the face of rising pressures and capabilities to decentralize and debureaucratize.