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This kinda contradicts the idea further up that too much attention is paid to process, at the detriment of, for lack of a better term, "skill" (or "personal responsibility") I think the focus on process can be terribly annoying, because it's so much easier to say "Bob fell asleep at the machine" than diving into all the events that led up to Bob falling asleep. Note that both can be true or, more accurately, the process problems actually need the statement "bob fell asleep" to be true to make sense. The idea to prioritise processes is that it's repeatable. Individual behaviour isn't within your control, except for the processes that hired somebody, educated them, defined their tasks, and created the environment in which they perform these tasks. In a small team, or family, or group of friends, it's perfectly fine to dock Bob's allowance for falling asleep. And the instinct to exact revenge, or punish people is strong, because those instincts are the result of evolution and norms of society, both of which until recently only knew small groups where everyone knew everybody. That's why it takes a lot of discipline to act against these instincts, and obviously, as you said, because focussing on the process may also uncover others who failed, and it is more tedious. People get frustrated with bureaucracy. Sometimes they're obviously right. But the idea that all bureaucracy is wasteful, or (equally common) that governments have any particular talent for wasteful bureaucracy is somewhat misguided. Because there aren't many examples for organising teams of sometimes hundreds of thousands of people to work on shared goals without a wasteful bureaucracy, and governments and the private sector tend not to differ that much. I've seen one interesting example of a different structure for organising a large number of people: capitalism. It arguably works, being excellent at delegating authority to exactly the right person for any possible decision. But I believe even that example isn't convincing, if you start considering all the "waste" that capitalism hides in plain sight: advertisement, competing efforts doubling work, the complete financial sector, non-monetary losses due to financial hardship, the losses from unemployment being essentially wasted potential etc. |