Bureaucracy is ubiquitous—and not exactly beloved. So why do we have bureaucracy? And how can we improve it so that governments and organizations can be more responsive to the people they serve rather than tying them up in red tape?
Jorrit de Jong, who directs the , has helped local governments in the United States and around the world learn how to become more innovative. We spoke with de Jong, who is also the Emma Bloomberg Senior Lecturer in Public Policy and Management, about why we have bureaucracy and how organizations can cut red tape.
Q: What exactly is bureaucracy?
Early in my career I co-founded the Kafka Brigade, a field research team focused on helping governments improve services for vulnerable citizens who disproportionately carry the burden of bureaucracy and red tape. The problem is often hard to solve because it’s misdiagnosed. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) once put out a report with the title “Why is Administrative Simplification So Complicated?” To answer that question, we need to look more closely at what’s underneath the surface level “red tape.”
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.
Q: What causes people to feel like they have been failed by bureaucracy?
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. 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 to better understand the communities they serve and measure performance learn and improve faster. Cities that use design thinking to resident services save time and money. And cities that across organizational and sector boundaries come up with more effective solutions to urban problems,.
Q: You have done extensive research on innovations that help improve government performance. Can you speak about what goes wrong in government and how to fix these problems?
My book “Dealing with Dysfunction” is about innovative problem-solving in the public sector. Put simply, it’s about taking a step back before jumping to a solution. Cutting red tape often fails because the problem is misdiagnosed. Some governments only scratch the surface—digitizing forms that are useless to begin with—while others go overboard by cutting important regulations just because the paperwork is cumbersome.
A better diagnosis starts with distinguishing different levels of analysis: user experience, organizational structure, culture, and statecraft. First, the user experience level: You could imagine a service—whether it is social benefits or tax filing or applying for a building permit—that’s designed in a way that is cumbersome to the individual and even potentially susceptible to fraud, waste, and abuse. That’s a poorly designed service. If that’s the case, you have to redesign the service from the perspective of the user—not just the “good” user, but also the user who is taking advantage of the system. User-centered design is a way to do that, for example, through simplifying language or designing better forms.
At a deeper level, it’s about structure. Organizations have different requirements, and you can get into a catch-22 situation. The classic example is where one city department needs you to have the door to your business swing open to the outside, for fire risk, but another agency needs you to have the door swing open to the inside because that's more in line with the zoning code. They are impossible contradictory regulations. There are also funding stream issues—sometimes money is available for one thing, say special needs education, and not for another, say transportation. If a student with special needs could benefit from going to a school that’s less expensive but farther away, chances are the money saved on tuition cannot be reallocated to commuting expenses. There is no user design that could improve the situation because you have to resolve it at the deeper level of structure. Regulatory changes, business process redesign, different performance metrics, and accountability mechanisms may help address these types of issues.
An even deeper level is (organizational) culture. If government officials are not equipped, authorized, or motivated to do the work, you can change structures all you want, but you won’t get the results you need. People’s values, beliefs, behaviors and professional logic add up to an organizational culture that can be hard to alter. Clarifying what the purpose of the work is, which values should guide it, who the clients are, and what success looks like will be as important as addressing structural issues and redesigning user experience. This work is not easy, as most public organizations have multiple dimensions of public value and different stakeholders to consider: the client receiving a service, the community as a whole, political executives, the taxpayers and voters, the courts. Acknowledging that there are inherent tensions and ambiguities in the work rather than pretending government bureaucracies are straightforward service providers is a good step towards culture change.
The deepest level is statecraft, or the art of governance: the mix of tools that governments use to accomplish the tasks it has set for itself. Think about regulation to govern economic activity and social behavior, direct services and payments to businesses and citizens, fiscal incentives, communication and nudges, etc. Even within those broad categories you have plenty of options but governments don’t always choose the right tool for the job. For example, if you want people to live in healthy and safe housing, you might think that your inspection services can just respond to whatever issues people report. But that assumes that people will call, and not everybody calls the government for a variety of reasons. Sometimes they’re afraid, or they don't believe that it makes a difference. It also assumes the best way to improve health and safety is to react to the most conspicuous deteriorating conditions after the fact. What if you made it easier to proactively inspect the buildings most at risk instead?
Let me give an example from Chelsea, Massachusetts, where the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative conducted a number of studies and pilots focused on social services and building inspections. We found that could help predict addresses most likely to be at-risk or in-need. But we also found that would often find issues they weren’t trained, equipped, or authorized to address, like mental health or substance abuse issues or unsafe social situations. These building inspectors were the ears and eyes of the city but did not have the tools. Empowering them to make social service referrals helped them connect people to what they needed. Creating synergy between a compliance-oriented agency and an assistance-oriented agency is not easy and requires strong direction. However, these types of “statecraft” innovations make government more effective, efficient, and responsive to people’s needs.
“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.”
Q: Do cities know how to diagnose and solve their “bureaucracy” problems?
Local governments are close to their constituents and there is a short feedback loop: City leaders immediately hear it when residents are unhappy. But they often lack the tools to systematically address performance issues. In our executive education and field work with mayors and senior city officials, we discuss real-life cases and introduce diagnostic tools that they can use in their own context to improve services.
One example is , which we published recently. It focuses on the bureaucratic red tape encountered by an immigrant entrepreneur trying to open a sandwich shop in Amsterdam. We use a method created by the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto. He charted the informal economy and mapped the whole process of what it would take to open a business, get a permit, etc. Similarly, the sandwich shop owners’ journey became classroom material for mayors. We ask the questions: What’s the problem here? How do we know what causes the problem? How do we begin to solve it? What would success look like? Who needs to work together on this issue? At what level do we intervene? The participants learn from the cases, the research-based diagnostic tools, and from applying these tools to their own context.
Q: How has your work changed people’s relationships with bureaucracy?
There was one woman who we worked with in a small city in Wales, and I will never forget her. She had been a victim of domestic violence. There were many government agencies and social service providers that were trying to help, but they were fragmented and could not provide the integrated help she and her family needed. In addition to what had happened to her and her kids, she had to deal with all this bureaucracy. It was a horrible story. We used the journey mapping technique and convened all the organizations ,who read her case and listened to her story. Her perspective changed everything—people saw where and how they could do a better job at reaching and effectively helping people in need. She actually was hired by the city to help improve these services.
I think, in an ideal world, that's how governments would work. They really take residents seriously. They tap into their experience. And they do a systematic diagnosis of what is going on, where they’re wasting time, money, and human potential, and how they can improve the quality of life for residents through government innovation.
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Banner photograph by Justin Merriman/Sipa USA/AP Images; inline image courtesy of Bloomberg Philanthropies