How can we cure the ills of bureaucracy without adding more bureaucrats to do the job - Essay Example

How can we cure the ills of bureaucracy without adding more bureaucrats to the job? The ills of bureaucracy are entrenchment and inefficiency, and combating them is not as easy as it might at first seem. The simple first answer is, of course, “We shall rigorously audit our procedures to increase efficiency,” but that seldom works. First it entails hiring more bureaucrats to conduct these audits, and somehow it tends to end up, a few years down the road, with the Department of Rigorous Audits adding layers of paperwork to every procedure, and in no hurry to regulate themselves out of a job.

Another popular solution is to outsource, to hire a private company to do part of the organization’s job. This tends to look more efficient on paper, as it can appear that one is just writing a check to a company and receiving back completed work. In practice, this is rarely any more efficient, as it adds at least one more layer of middlemen to take their time and take their cut, and it depends on the idea that the company doing the work is itself somehow immune to the ills of bureaucracy. Then, too, once the contract is assigned, the incentive on the contracted company is to entrench itself and its contract as firmly as any heirloom system.

The best available solution at present seems to be the adoption of low-friction systems and practices—low-friction in the sense of providing little resistance to the free movement of information, goods, money, or personnel. When information can flow freely and unrestricted, the possibilities develop rapidly, because everything else follows information. In times gone by, for example, a long-haul trucker, even one who owned his own truck, was dependent on a company to organize his runs, because managing the information about who needed what hauled to where was a full time job.

Now that same trucker can simply log into a database and see available freight jobs for the entire country. He can sort them by area or by his truck’s capacity, and plan out as many jobs as he needs, according to his own schedule. Multiple layers of paperwork and untold numbers of frustrated phone calls have been eliminated with the click of a mouse. Low-friction systems can be as simple as software that proofreads a document for spelling and grammar automatically, or as complex as a worldwide network connecting buyers to sellers without middlemen, but they are increasingly pervasive.

What is presently lacking is a fully understood and systematized set of best practices for their use. Best practices may be defined as ideas, practices, and systems that may not be an ideal fit for every individual situation, but which have been shown to, on average, work well most of the time. For example, certain low-friction systems can be too efficient at their specific jobs, without regard for the context in which those jobs occur. Whereas stock trading used to be entirely the province of white-shirted men shouting at each other across an exchange floor, now automated computer systems can perform thousands of trades a second to take best advantage of minute-by-minute shifts in markets, allowing for much greater levels of trade than the cumbersome floors full of brokers doing paperwork.

However, some of the recent economic dislocation has been traced to programs that performed their tasks too fast and too efficiently, meaning that market reactions spun quickly into overreactions, and corrections into overcorrections, without the intervention of human judgment to provide a brake. It is useful to remember, in curing the ills of bureaucracy, that some of the systems in place may have arisen for a reason.