Once a bureaucracy grows beyond a certain size, it exists only to sustain itself and to grow. No bureaucracy ever recognizes its inefficient dysfunction, nor do the people who serve it ever examine it, seek to improve it, apply logic and reason to it, or say no to it. If the people who suffer its abuses are lucky, the monolith may one day collapse of its own weight. But until then, everyone who suffers by it is stuck with it.

Case in point: the United States Postal Service (USPS).

On September 3^rd, I ordered a cap from a hat shop in San Diego, California. The graphic on the left shows the circuitous and time-consuming route it took to reach its final destination in Middletown, Connecticut.

By my count, there were eight stops along the way at which someone might have taken notice of what was going on, scratched his head in wonder (if not logic), and said, “Hey, I have an idea. Why don’t we get the USPS to send this thing from here [pick one of the eight stops] to the poor schlemiel in Connecticut who’s waiting for it?”

The answer, of course, would have been something along the lines of, “Well, that’s not the way we do things around here.” And just as surely, no one would have asked, “Exactly why the hell is it that we do things the way we do them around here.”

Back to Square One

The USPS embodies the bureaucratic manifestation of the Peter Principle, first laid out in the 1968 book called, originally enough, The Peter Principle. The principle contends employees in organizations are promoted to the level of their respective incompetence. Thereafter, they’re never put back into the positions in which they were competent because the organization won’t deem incompetence sufficient to warrant such a move, presuming it recognizes the incompetence at all. Following that pattern, it’s easy enough to imagine everyone in the organization rising to their levels of incompetence which, in a relatively small organization, might explain poor organizational performance.

But beyond a certain point, bureaucracies become dysfunctional for three reasons:

1. They’re too large for anyone to be able to take notice of their dysfunction.
2. They breed levels of invisibility and anonymity that nullify the ability to meaningfully assess the performance of any individual.
3. Once individuals recognize #2 is true, they can take advantage of that invisibility and anonymity without risk.

Since the graphic above was taken from the USPS website via the tracking number sent to me, it’s a safe bet the three days it took from the time I placed my order to the time it went to pre-shipment status was due to USPS dysfunction.

What the hell is pre-shipment anyway? Something’s either shipped, or it’s not. And why did it have to go from the origin facility in San Diego at 11:57 on the 6^th (I’d have thought the origin facility would have been the hat shop) to the regional origin facility in San Diego at 13:12? From San Diego, why did it have to go to Los Angeles to Chicopee to Boston to Nashua to Springfield to the southern Connecticut distribution facility (wherever that is) to Middletown? And where’s Mr. Zip when you need him?

Cause and Effect

The only way to make sense of all of the blind bureaucracy of the USPS is to see it in context; that is, to recognize it’s a subset of the planet’s largest, least efficient, most expensive, and most irretrievably unwieldy bureaucracy, the United States government. And it’s indicative of why the notion of government service is, at this point in our history, somewhere between (oxy)moronic and caustically cynical.

There’s one sure test by which to determine if any bureaucracy is beyond the point of no return: Look at the last time — if there was ever any time at all — at which it said, “No,” to anything. If the United States government weren’t too self-serving and self-perpetuating to say, “No,” (it is), we wouldn’t be where we are. And it wouldn’t take 11 days to get a cap from San Diego to Middletown.

We’re all living in Brazil. And it’s all bureaucrap.

Originally Published on https://www.bizcatalyst360.com/category/lifecolumns/notes-to-self/

Mark O'Brien Writer, Blogger

I'm the founder and principal of O'Brien Communications Group (obriencg.com) and the co-founder and President of EinSource (einsource.com). I'm a lifelong writer. My wife, Anne, and I have two married sons and four grandchildren. I'm having the time of my life.