The Folly of the Bureaucratic Mind in a Messy World

G'd begat the Bureaucrat and the Bureaucrat begat Rules. And the Rules begat the suffering of the masses.

Now I am sure that phrase came from somewhere in the Bible. Or if it didn't, it should have.

Please don't get me wrong. I am not against there being rules in our world. None of us want rampant anarchy in our streets or crime and mayhem happening everywhere. The only bone I have to pick is that Rules, with a capital "R," seem to take on a life of their own and then the well-meaning folks we appoint to be bureaucrats suddenly become very lazy and believe that they no longer have to use their thinking processes anymore. Everything in the world becomes a black or white issue. Why should they waste their energy assessing situations to see if the Rule actually applies or makes sense in a specific situation? The rules are in place, so all they have to do is to mindlessly enforce the rules, which sometimes seem to make absolutely no sense in a given case.

Years ago, a fellow named Lawrence Peter, wrote a book called The Peter Principle. He touched on this tendency of some people to lose their capacity to look at a situation and use their capacity to think to assess that situation. You would think that teachers, as a group, would stand out as individuals who would be capable of working their way through problem, even if it means occasionally breaking a rule to do it. Take the case of the rule that a teacher could not let students leave a classroom unless the bell rang. There was a teacher whose room was being flooded by a water pipe which burst in the room. However, because the bell had not rung, she had to be ordered by the assistant principal, who happened to be passing by, to evacuate the room.

One of the school districts in the Houston area had a zero-tolerance policy on taking drugs. One pinhead of a bureaucrat at the school, banished a straight-A student with no disciplinary problems to one of the schools alternative schools, for the heinous act of taking an aspirin because she had a headache. Hey, after all, argued the bureaucrat, it was drug. Her parents protested but the school district would not rescind the action. Her parents in short order pulled her from the public school system and put her in a private school.

I am not picking on the educational establishment particularly. These just happen to be the most blatant of examples that came to my mind first. If one looks hard enough in our governmental bureaucracies or in industry or in the finance sector... or maybe doensn't look particularly hard at all, one will find this to be a rampant problem. Or maybe even in our judicial system. Imagine that!! All this makes the intelligent and hard-working administrators throughout our society who actually do a good job look really bad unnecesarily.

Every day, seemingly intelligent people become real slackards when all they have to do is invoke the Rule in the face of a situation that demands judgment on their part. They have covered their behinds and they are off the hook. And some poor individual gets really shafted because another person is unwilling or just plain lazy or, as is very often the case, is afraid to go out on a limb and do the right thing. Too often the person in charge, for whatever the reason, does not ask the right questions: Do the facts justify using the rule against another person? Or not?

What is lost when this very wrong sort of thing happens? First of all, any semblance of fairness or equity in enforcing rules goes out the window. Circumstances should alter decisions about what actions should be taken given the situation. Too often, the facts about a situation seem to have no discernable relationship to the decisions made relating to that situation.

Worse yet, the person who enforces the Rule in a slavish, unthinking sort of way begins to come off as a person who clearly does not want to be confused or bothered with the facts of the situation... ergo, suddenly looks like an abject incomptent yes-man or yes-woman. It is easy to sluff off bad judgment by singing out, "We do it the company way." But that does not make what is happening right or fair.

The rules that we put in place in most situations should be guidelines at most. We need some guidelines as benchmarks which we can use to decide if something is good or bad... if someone should be rewarded or reprimanded... if an action deserves accolades or razzies. But the realities of our human society are often worlds apart from the ideal that we strive to achieve. Sometimes it is just a bit frustrating to see that the best intended Rules create more havoc and unfairness than if the Rules had never been put in place in the first place. At least if there were not rules, in every case, people would first have to look at the facts and figure out where to go from there. But hey, folks, that would actually make sense.

Nah!! That will never happen.