This is the last post in a series about Agile in the Ether’s first in-person event. So far we’ve had notes on:

• building connections
• beyond DORA
• domain storytelling (with special guest author)

For the final workshop, Jen Oliver chose a subject familiar to lots of us: What are the sources of too-much-bureaucracy where you work, what frustrations does that cause, and – most importantly – does anyone have any ideas on what to do about it?

Maybe it’s not all bad

Bureaucracy really can be frustrating and a timesink – most places that have grown to any size could do much better with it. C. Northcote Parkinson (famous for the “work expands to fill the time available” saying) had a formula for the growth of it: “the number employed in a bureaucracy rose by 5–7% per year ‘irrespective of any variation in the amount of work (if any) to be done’”, and calculated a “coefficient of inefficiency”. I’m not sure how rigorous the science is behind these, but it’s interesting to read about the patterns he spotted.

However, it’s worth challenging our assumptions. I can be a bit too quick to decide anything that slows my job down is “unnecessary bureaucracy”, and jump to labelling things “waste” when that might not be justified.

For a different view, I recommend reading The art of business value by Mark Schwartz. It’s a deep dive into what’s meant by “business value”: “I hope that I am saying things you already feel in your bones. There has been a gap in our literature on the subject of business value”

He references The elephants in the agile room, a post describing how many of the authors of the agile manifesto got back together at Snowbird 10 years after the original meeting, and discussed various topics they hadn’t faced into enough. Number 12 was business value: “mentioned everywhere, but not clearly defined, or pushed onto others to resolve.”

What a business values can be different for every organisation, isn’t limited to “ROI” or other simple measures …. and there’s often signals about what’s valued in the overhead that gets imposed on us with bureaucratic processes.

“we are implicitly assuming there is a stable, objective, pre-ordained definition of business value. And we are determined to deliver on that definition, despite the organisation around us. In my experience, this arrogance is not warranted”

– The art of business value

Related to the instinct to see all bureaucracy as unneeded: I’ve been trained to see silos as a bad thing, and believe everything would be better if we could just tear them all down. Dave Snowden has an alternative view: In The importance of silos he argues that organisational silos are inevitable (people have been complaining about them since Ancient Greece), and beneficial (there’s just too much to understand and explain; shared context on specific areas is the only way to get knowledge shared and work done).

From these two sources, I’ve heard:

• Bureaucracy is often a signal about something the business values; you might have more success looking into what that thing is, and helping find more efficient ways to meet that need.
• Silos are an important feature; it’s more useful to help form connections between them than to wipe them out.

Building empathy

Bureaucracy’s meant to feel impersonal; in its best form, it gives clear, fair, repeatable ways to get things done. But when it’s not working well the “faceless machine” can be especially frustrating, and often you have no idea what “they” are thinking. We can work on that …

The article On Bureaucracy from James Reeve has some helpful thoughts on this topic, including the painful quote “We use ‘bureaucracy’ as a scapegoat for our own laziness”. It’s got suggestions on building shared understanding.

In Some thoughts on how to not screw-up organisational transformation, Mark Dalgarno recommends including people from other areas in your digital teams.

“I see people working in supporting roles as essential to delivery and so should be considered part of the delivery team as much as your developers, interaction designers, product owners etc… Thinking like this helps avoid situations where people see themselves as somehow more special than others”

– Mark Dalgarno

Mark’s got a wide range of posts on this subject – see also What is an enabling mindset? and 4 metrics for enabling teams for more on the work he’s done.

Other good sources of “how do I persuade people to change things around here” ideas:

• Esther Derby’s 7 rules for positive, productive change book was great, I haven’t done enough to put things from it into practice. I’ve seen a book club facilitation guide for it, with practical exercises.
• I once went to a remote “fearless change campfire” based Dr Mary Lynn Manns and Dr Linda Rising’s Fearless change patterns – more are planned!

Providing a service

One angle I like: while bureaucracy might be providing something valuable or necessary, it shouldn’t be the star of the show – I’d love to encourage people to see it more as a service, and to think about making that service as good and efficient as possible.

Richard McLean has a nice Why I see governance as a service post, and an extensive reading list of lots more people’s advice. Richard has definitely been working on this topic for a while; his posts on “We all need governance” (part 1 and part 2) have more advice on empathy, measurement, and how to change things.

I have had some success in this area – using the same value stream mapping or kanban metric tracking techniques that work for all kinds of processes – but only when someone who knows these well makes time to come and do specific exercises on them. It’s really hard to get people to adopt these long term, and I think I can see why; knowing how to make good use of them and having the time and thinking space to do that is a big ask, not something you can expect to just lump onto someone’s already busy job.

Some books I haven’t read

I’ve listened to two podcasts about books recently that sound very related to this challenge:

Hack your bureaucracy by Marina Nitze and Nick Sinai sounds full of real-life examples and practical advice. Marina appeared in this You are not so smart podcast episode to talk it through. In one part of the US government, ceilngs were literally collapsing from the weight of paperwork as it piled up for years – and Marina had lots of entertaining stories and memorably-named tricks to improve things (”Stab people in the chest” was an interesting metaphor).

Earlier in this post I linked to a book from Mark Schwartz and a blog post from Mark Dalgarno. In this Create/Change Primer podcast episode, the two of them discuss Mark Schwartz’s next book: The Delicate Art of Bureaucracy: Digital Transformation with the Monkey, the Razor, and the Sumo Wrestler (seems like interesting metaphors is a theme for both these books). They discuss characteristics of a “bad” bureaucracy (”bloated, coercive, petrified”) and its opposite (”lean, enabling, learning”), along with lots of examples from their own experiences.

The end (for now)

That ends my posts on the Agile in the Ether IRL day … if we do get another one organised, I’m sure I’ll have more to share.