Interview with Jorrit de Jong: “..Bureaucracy is not so much a system of rules, it is a system of values. It is an organizational form that governs how work gets done in accordance with principles that the sociologist Max Weber first codified: standardization, formalization, expert officialdom, specialization, hierarchy, and accountability. Add those up and you arrive at a system that values the written word; that is siloed because that’s what specialization does; that can sometimes be slow because there is a chain of command and an approval process. Standardization supports the value that it doesn’t matter who you are, who you know, what you look like when you’re applying for a permit, or who is issuing the permit: the case will be evaluated based on its merits. That is a good thing. Bureaucracy is a way to do business in a rational, impersonal, responsible and efficient way, at least in theory…
It becomes a problem when organizations start to violate their own values and lose connection with their purpose. If standardization turns into rigidity, doing justice to extenuating individual circumstances becomes hard. If formalization becomes pointless paper pushing, it defeats the purpose. And if accountability structures favor risk aversion over taking initiative, organizations can’t innovate.
Bureaucratic dysfunction occurs when the system that we’ve created ceases to produce the value that we wanted out of it. But that does not mean we have to throw away the baby with the bathwater. Can we create organizations that have the benefits of accountability, standardization and specialization without the burdens of slowness, rigidity, and silos? My answer is yes. Research we did with the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative shows how organizations can improve performance by building capabilities that make them more nimble, responsive, and user-friendly. Cities that leverage data to better understand the communities they serve and measure performance learn and improve faster. Cities that use design thinking to reinvent resident services save time and money. And cities that collaborate across organizational and sector boundaries come up with more effective solutions to urban problems…(More)”