Inertia

Systemic bureaucratic failures breed inertia and internal complexity within organisations. Consider all those “$200 t-shirt” events (see article: Does your company need a Director of Getting Sh*t Done?) which occur across all those organisational systems, bureaucracies and massively interconnected systems in which we all participate. There is a clear and present problem illustrated by the cascading waves of unnecessary cost, administrative inertia and proliferating inefficiencies across our Global organisations and their associated massively interdependent, interconnected, networked systems. The solutions to these kinds of ubiquitous issues are probably not actionable (at least within larger organisations) by single points of authority, governance or control: the existing diverse axioms and bottle-necked logics of administration and bureaucracy will not likely resolve the problems of bureaucracy, they will merely generate more uncontrollable internal complexity and subsequent inefficiencies.

Fundamental realignment and rebuilding of organisational systems, of structural assumptions and of hierarchical control systems is a possibility but it is not inconceivable that having percolated up through such a system, the senior managers capable of enacting such change would perhaps be those most unwilling to commit to the changes required to induce the metamorphosis of their own organisations from within. Issues of personal, social and organisational psychology may prove themselves to be intractable in this context.