Cobra Effect · People and organisations
Pournelle’s iron law of bureaucracy
In any organisation, those who serve the organisation end up in charge.
7 cards, read aloud in 2:18, with a test and sources.
Two kinds of people work at the school.
One kind is there to teach children. The other kind is there to run the school. Ask which of them decides how the school is run, and you have the whole story.
Jerry Pournelle wrote it down as a law.
He was a science fiction writer and essayist, and he claimed this one held in any organisation at all. There are people devoted to its goal, and people devoted to the organisation itself. The second group always ends up in charge.
It is not a conspiracy. It is a difference in how the days are spent.
The teacher spends her day teaching. The administrator spends his day on committees, budgets and appointments. Committees, budgets and appointments are how a school is actually run. Only one of them is practising the skill that decides things.
So the place slowly fills with people who serve the place.
They are usually sincere and often hard working. But when the mission and the institution pull apart, they choose the institution, because that is what they are loyal to. And they choose who gets hired next.
You can see it from outside with two counts and a decade.
Count the people doing the work the place exists to do. Count everyone else. Then find the same two counts from ten years ago. The direction of travel tells you who is winning.
He called it iron. That is a strong word, and worth holding loosely.
Plenty of organisations fight the drift, with flat structures and leaders drawn from the work itself. None of them manage it by accident. Left alone, the drift goes one way.
The question to ask about any institution, including yours.
Who here is rewarded for the mission, and who is rewarded for the machinery? If the second group writes the rules, the mission is on borrowed time. Promote somebody who still does the work. Then protect them from the committees.
Sources
- Jerry Pournelle, Wikipedia. The writer who stated the law. Search the page for the iron law of bureaucracy, and search online for his own wording of it on his site Chaos Manor.
- Bureaucracy, James Q. Wilson. His study of what government agencies actually do and why, including how the people who run an agency come to shape what it is for. This page covers the author and his work.
- Bureaucracy, the idea itself, Wikipedia. Max Weber’s case that bureaucracy is the most efficient way to organise, and the long argument about where it turns into an interest of its own.
Nearby ideas
- The iron law of oligarchy. Even democratic groups end up run by a permanent few.
- The Shirky principle. Institutions tend to preserve the problem they exist to solve.
- The Peter principle. Why people get promoted until they reach a job they cannot do.
- The bus factor. How many people could leave before the work stops.
- Sayre’s law. The smaller the stakes, the fiercer the argument.
- Amara’s law. We overrate new technology in the short run and underrate it in the long.
- Tuckman’s stages. Why new teams have to fight before they can work well.
- The Robbers Cave experiment. Rival groups make peace when they need each other, not when they mix.