The Busting Bureaucracy Hackathon

I wonder if, when people are sharing ideas, they might talk about the things they've actually tried? That might be helpful and certainly make for more interesting reading for me. As I'm reading the posts, in all fairness, I'm hearing a lot of euphemisms and buzz words, but I'm not hearing the stories of people who are actually out there working at a coal face. Perhaps I have to read more, which I will in time. In my case, I understand that the bureacracy was formed for a reason. I believe Max Weber, noted psychologist spoke at some length about how and why bureaucracies work. And they still work in specific contexts.... mainly for ordered problems (ie non complex). Problem is, until recently we have not distinguished between truly complex (emergent, parts are larger than the whole, co-evolution) and ordered (ie machines) systems, so we have sicked the bureacracy on our ordered and complex problems. And then wondered why the heck our ordered solutions didn't work on our complex problems. I believe Dave Snowden, noted complexity thought leader, calls this 'bounded applicability'. That solutions only work in context, and you have to understand the context (is my problem ordered? is it complex?) or your solution can't scale up or across. So here's my advice. Learn to understand the difference. Work towards efficiencies in your ordered systems (machines), work towards effectiveness in your complex systems.Effectiveness in this case often means that you don't suck all the redundancy out of your complex systems, since you can't predict what's going to happen next in truly complex systems (so for example, no six sigma). You can approach robustness in ordered systems (six sigma good), but not complex systems. There you have to shoot for resilience: the capability to tolerate and recover from failure quickly. This is guts of the new management science coming at you. Have fun!!