The Bureaucracy in our minds
“The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.” ~ Oscar Wilde
In December I posted this on Linkedin:
Here's a speech about the state of the NHS by Tony Benn. He spoke these words on the 22nd of November 1995, nearly 30 years ago.
"I expect that the House has heard of the little document, which is circulating, about the boat race between the NHS and a Japanese crew. Both sides tried hard to do well, but the Japanese won by a mile. The NHS was very discouraged and set up a consultancy. The consultancy came to the conclusion that the Japanese had eight people rowing and one steering, whereas the NHS had eight people steering and one rowing. The NHS appointed people to look at the problem and decided to reorganise the structure of the team so that there were three steering managers, three assistant steering managers and a director of steering services, and an incentive was offered to the rower to row harder. When the NHS lost a second race, it laid off the rower for poor performance and sold the boat. It gave the money it got from selling the boat to provide higher than average pay awards for the director of steering services. That is what is happening all over the place. There is masses of bureaucracy in the health service and a denial of what people need."
My post of Tony Benn’s speech is by a long way the most viewed piece I have ever posted on Linked in.
To date it’s had:
155,017 views, 1,390 reactions,
216 comments and
110 reposts.
And, the people reading the post were a serious bunch - according to the analytics, 3,007 of them were managing directors.
Why was this post so popular?
It is astounding to me that such a simple post provoked such interest. It really seems to have resonated with a lot of people, and I have been wondering why.
There are two reasons why the post was meaningful: First, there are the straightforward ‘superficial’ reasons; and second, the more nuanced ‘beneath the surface', unconscious psychological reasons.
At a superficial level, it’s a good story. The metaphor of a boat race between an NHS crew and Japanese crew is amusing and very elegantly makes the point that bureaucracy kills performance. It expresses an essential and eternal truth about the nature of organisational life.
It also taps into current concerns about the state of the NHS. For example nurses going on strike for better pay while the NHS advertises for a ‘director of ‘lived experience’ (what other sort of experience is there?) for a salary north of £100k pa.
The post also gives a voice to the aversion that we have to petty ‘jobsworth’ bureaucracy. Who doesn’t hate the chore of having to do endless piles of paperwork that seem to have no real purpose.
Another theme in the post is the disconnection between managers and the frontline staff who do the actual work. It’s summed up beautifully in the Oscar Wilde quote “The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy”.
Finally, many of the comments say that Tony Benn’s speech was made over 30 years ago, and yet nothing has changed.
Our own internal ‘psychological bureaucracy’
Going a little deeper, Tony Benn’s story contains a psychological defence mechanism called splitting.
All the incompetence is located in the NHS team and all the competence is located in the Japanese team. This splitting or black and white thinking is common in all organisations. I’m sure that if you pause to reflect, you can think of examples from your own organisation. Sometimes it feels like either our team or department is working hard and every other team or department is lazy or useless.
What else might Tony Benn’s metaphor say about our own internal psychological world?
Whenever you read something that strikes a chord with you; that resonates with you or seems particularly meaningful; think about what it might reveal about your own way of perceiving the world. What does it say about you and your psychological makeup?
When things (stories, news items, poems, music, art work, political statements etc) have a strong meaning for you, or prompt a noticeable emotional reaction in you, they always have multiple levels of meaning. There's an obvious ‘superficial’ meaning and a deeper, more profound meaning that can reveal a truth about yourself.
Most often, the reason things are memorable and appear meaningful is because they resonate with something deep inside your mind.
What deeper more profound truth might the Tony Benn story have for us?
Maybe it resonates with our own personal ambivalence about change. There’s a part of us that wants to change and sees the need for change, whilst there is another part that feels comfortable as we are and is terrified of changing.
One of the interesting things about the quote is that Tony Benn spoke these words 30 years ago and yet nothing has changed in the NHS. In a sense there is a part of you that’s like the Japanese rowing team that wants to get on with the race and win and another part like the NHS rowing team who wants to think (overthink) about moving forward but doesn’t actually do anything.
This might be a common experience for us. It's the New Year now and many of us would have made resolutions about how we want to change in some way. But, what happened to the resolutions you made on New Year's Day 2022?
Maybe we're pretty much the same now as we were then.
The post resonated with our own unconscious fear of change.
Just as the NHS rowing team had lots of meetings, and brought in more managers and consultants, and eventually laid off the rower, we do something similar in our mind.
We see the possibility of doing something new and so we spend ages researching it, asking other people, or even doing an online course. Doing all this ‘research’ helps us to avoid the anxiety of actually getting on and changing things.
, think about yourself and your life. Is your internal psychological bureaucracy getting in the way of you changing? This time next year, or even 30 years from now, will you be in the Japanese rowing team or the NHS rowing team - talking about change but ending up exactly the same as you are now.