Feed aggregator

Greeting’s readers. For this week’s professional discussion we have a piece from our Colonel thinking about how to tend the military bureaucracies. Often derided for the inanity of the extremes, it must be admitted that but for these internal organizing principles and apparatuses large and complex institutions like the armed forces would exceed human administration. Thus, evil though it might perpetuate, the bureaucracy also means that things really do get done rather than collapsing under the weight of every detail. The challenge is in discriminating such that you preserve the good and manage the bad, identify the flab while maintaining the muscle.  So, read the piece, consider the questions, and join the discussion on Twitter at #CCLKOW.

I enjoy gardening. There is something both satisfying and therapeutic about working with nature in the pursuit of growth.  I would not however say that I am a good gardener; in fact my gardening skills have been described as somewhat apocalyptic. In an attempt to improve my green fingered skills I often listen in to BBC Radio’s “Gardeners’ Question Time” a thoroughly British institution. A hardy perennial on this show is the subject of pruning which is often necessary to encourage new growth, and it is with the subject of pruning in mind that my thoughts turned to that of military bureaucracy.

It is a given in every military that military bureaucracy is bad and needs pruning.  The former might or might not be the case but the latter is definitely true.  There is a lot of dead bureaucracy out there, bureaucracy that has served its purpose and is no longer required.  This needs cut back to focus on the essential bureaucracy, for bureaucracy is essential.  Now my well thumbed copy of Charles Handy’s “Understanding Organisations” (an excellent book, every field grade officer should own it) uses German sociologist’s Max Weber’s definition of a bureaucracy as:

1. A division of labour in which authority and responsibility is clearly defined for each member, and is officially sanctioned.
2. Offices or positions are organized into a hierarchy of authority resulting in a chain of command.
3. All organisational members are to be selected on the basis of technical qualifications through formal examinations or by virtue of training and education.
4. Officials are to be appointed, not elected.
5. Administrators work for fixed salaries and are career officers.
6. The administrative official does not own the administered unit but is a salaried official.
7. The administrator is subject to strict rules, discipline, and controls regarding the official duties.

From this definition it is very clear that we, the military, are indeed a bureaucracy (whether we like it or not). What I want to talk about however, is the manifestation of bureaucracy in the rules, regulations, requirements and paperwork peculiar to our institutions.

The intent of a bureaucratic structure is to enable an organisation to function effectively and efficiently.  Bureaucracy, the manifestation of a bureaucratic structure, is supposed to be the oil that lubricates the cogs of power, not the grit that jams the gearing.  All too often however the means (a bureaucracy) becomes the end; in the British Army we refer to this state as a “self-licking lollipop”. The same is often perceived as true for the forms in which bureaucracy takes, the process seems to become an end in itself.  Yet all those rules, regulations and paperwork we chafe at serve a purpose, or did so at one time.  Where that purpose is redundant the bureaucracy has become dead bureaucracy, the purpose is dead but the process remains; like old growth it too needs pruning.

As a rough bureaucratic gardener’s rule of thumb the more bureaucracy irritates us the greater the requirement for pruning. We chafe most against those elements whose purpose we cannot discern, or whose utility we see as peripheral (at best) to operational output. Few chafe at the requirement to sit a driving test and hold a driving license before driving.  Furthermore that which we chafe against reveals much about our organisation. Bureaucracy is supposed to enable the effective and efficient functioning of the organisation, it assists in minimizing risk; but what kind of risk and risk to whom? Bureaucracy can be a window to the soul of the organisation exposing what is acceptable and what is not, where risk is tolerated and where not.  It can tell us uncomfortable truths about who we are.

In thinking down this path I was struck by elements on both sides of the Atlantic.  In the UK leave for field grade officers and above is self-certified.  For those below field grade an application is made to the chain of command which simply states when you want leave and where you will be spending it.  Here in the US the following are required:  Leave Pass request sheet, Hard Copy DA 31, Leave and Earnings Statement (LES), Travel Risk Planning System (TRiPS) completed and a detailed Travel Plan, Privately Operated Vehicle (POV) inspection certificate (is your car safe to drive), flight itinerary (as applicable), and the AKO MEDPROS printout.  It seems to me a little excessive and I was surprised that anyone let alone field grades, was required to complete this.  Presumably if you have commanded a company or a battalion you can be trusted to plan your leave or does mission command only apply in the field?  In this instance the bureaucracy in camp seems at odds with the command ethos in the field.  Now I can understand the purpose of this bureaucratic requirement, but does one size fit all? What mechanism exists for pruning back this when it is no longer relevant?  When I think of my experience of the US Army’s bureaucracy I think of “bureaucracy by attrition”. It tells me that this is an organisation that does not welcome people “stepping out of lane”; its manifestation and ethos seems at odds with the Army Operating Concept.

Much of the UK bureaucracy that I find irksome, owes as much in my opinion to minimising political and reputational risk as it does to operational effectiveness.  I understand the requirement to maintain an operational training record of all training a soldier receives prior to deployment. I cannot help but feel however, that the bureaucracy that now surrounds this requirement owes more to providing an audit trail in the event of an inquest than it does to ensuring that soldiers are sufficiently trained to deploy. The amount of bureaucracy seems excessive to the (operational) value gained, but guards reputational risk (we train our soldiers effectively) and minimizes political risk (training was resourced correctly).   Likewise I was struck by the bureaucracy regarding working with Personally Identifiable Information (PII).  Successive UK governments have been embarrassed by the loss of PII by different government departments (including the Ministry of Defence).  Naturally this has resulted in a regime to enforce best practice and accountability.  But again, the handling of PII has been normalized, we know how to do it, The annual training and certification programme now seems excessive  to the requirement and indicates the absence of risk tolerance in this area.  It seems to me that the UK bureaucratic emphasis indicates acute political sensitivity and a focus on minimizing (organisational) reputational risk.

We military personnel are largely bureaucrats in a bureaucratic organisation.  We should acknowledge and embrace this, because it is only by doing this that we can recognise the impacts of our bureaucracy on our organisations for good and for ill.  To parody Clausewitz  “The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the leader has to make is to establish . . . the kind of ethos on which they are embarking and the bureaucracy to support it.”

So my questions for this week are simple:

What does your bureaucracy tell you about your organisation?

What would you prune?

Where would you encourage new growth?

L'aide internationale commence à arriver au Vanuatu, dévasté par Pam, un terrible cyclone qui a rasé des villages entiers. Les autorités ont décrété l'état d'urgence et tentent encore d'évaluer les dégâts, tandis que le bilan humain reste incertain. Selon Baldwin Lonsdale, le président de l'archipel, « tout est à reconstruire ».

7H40. « Tout est à reconstruire »

• Lire la suite de Vanuatu : « Tout est à reconstruire » après le passage du cyclone Pam