Why are you hitting yourself?

You know, when I do that to myself, I feel it and want it to stop!

Two questions. Why are we doing that again? And. Why is doing this so hard?

You probably come across these yourself quite often at work. Maybe you even asked one of those today.

I, today, want to talk about the case where both of these questions have a peculiar commonality. The case of the organization hitting itself on purpose...

Once upon a time...

No, nope. I'm not going there. No back story, just theory for now.

Organization is a good thing. At least in general, the idea of it. Unless you are a cryptographer in search of a good source of entropy. Other than that, organizing things, like groups of people whose output is intended to reach a congruent goal, is a good thing.

If only there wasn't that peculiar emergent behavior.

What I (and surely, dear reader, you too) often witness is that in an Organization and over time, we lose track of why something was being done or why some rule existed. This in turn causes the org to perform less and less well. How could it not, being that more and more effort is spent on doing things that do not matter any more or circumventing things that shouldn't be a problem any more.

There are many reasons why something like this might happen

1. Sometimes, the scaffold becomes the building. Instead of trying to reach the goal, the organization starts focusing on trying to perform the process intended to reach the goal, without actually caring about the goal any more.
2. Sometimes, an organization's reality changes over time in a way where, internally, it doesn't make sense to keep the ownership relationships or management structures it did. Only that nobody really wants to do a management reshuffle.
3. Sometimes, bureaucracy and red tape take over. Rules and procedures that were originally intended to help our goals (by ensuring quality/safety/legality, etc) become cumbersome and counterproductive.
4. Sometimes its even personal where one manager just won't admit they don't want to have anything to do with another manager. Even worse, sometimes it's the boss' bosses that order their people to block each other.

Do you think this is solid ground upon which we stand?

In many cases, you can start addressing these things from the bottom up. By pointing out to the right people what can be safely stopped. You might even get some sort of promotion out of it. What you definitely will get is pushback from the people afflicted by your hypothesis. And it often is a difficult way to take. You point out that a set of rules a process or even a whole product doesn't really have a place in your enterprise will not only put the affected management into defcon 1, there will be employees down that org-chart that might as a first reaction and for various reasons decide it is in their best interest to refute your thesis, no matter what.

How it responds to well intentioned improvement proposals will also tell you a thing or two about the qualitative underpinnings of an organization.

There are enough people on the internet that will remind you of how demanding it is to manage people, or to have responsibility of on organization. It is true. Managing is not easy. But managers also aren't altruists. By the time you are talking real leadership, the altruists will have been weeded out for "company man" roles.