Unsustainable Bloat and Bicycle Shed Bureaucracy

In which we create more jobs and fill them up

(Warning! Maybe, just maybe, this is part of my critical appraisal of a working structure that is stuck in the 1900s. Don't tell your boss. Or my boss.)

Let’s start in the middle of those 1900s. In 1955, British author Cyril Northcote Parkinson suggested Parkinson's law:

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

In 1957, he added Parkinson's law of triviality:

The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum [of money] involved.

Parkinson illustrated his law of triviality with what has become known as the bicycle-shed effect. In his example, people planning to build a nuclear power plant spend most of their time pointlessly arguing about the color of the bicycle shed for the employees. This actually has its roots in our psychology, namely in ambiguity aversion. We prefer known risks over unknown ones. Most people don’t know how a nuclear reactor works, but we all have an opinion on what color is best for a bicycle shed. So, most people in the planning committee will spend time arguing on the bike shed, because only a few will have any idea about what building a nuclear reactor requires.

We can summarize the combination of Parkinson’s two laws as follows: the working hours we are given (or give ourselves) always fill themselves up with things to do, and most of that time is taken up by things that are not that important. A 2021 study in Experimental Economics found this to be true:

… participants deviate in systematic ways from the optimal strategy. They tend to hesitate too long and oversample information when it is relatively costly.

… an interesting application of our results is that they can help explain why people tend to spend too much time making their mind about decisions with small stakes.

So far, we’ve focused on the individual level of a job, but the thing about Parkinson's law is that he originally applied it at an organizational level. Administration and bureaucracy expand and create more jobs (according to Parkinson, regardless of how much actual work there is to be done). From there, it’s a small step to David Graeber’s ‘The Utopia of Rules’ (recommended read) in which he suggests we live in the ‘age of total bureaucratization’.

That actually seems to be the case. According to a 2016 essay in the Harvard Business Review (emphasis mine):

… there’s compelling evidence that bureaucracy creates a significant drag on productivity and organizational resilience and innovation. By our reckoning, the cost of excess bureaucracy in the U.S. economy amounts to more than $3 trillion in lost economic output…

Nowhere is this more obvious than in academia. This article in Non-Profit Quarterly states that whereas US faculty has grown by 63%, administrative roles have grown by 231%. Similarly, academics are now the minority of staff in most UK universities.

None of the above implies that this production of (often bureaucratic or administrative) jobs is ‘bad’. But it does imply an unsustainable bloat of jobs that are mostly filled with busy work that may not contribute all that much to society. (Recommended Graeber read number two: Bullshit Jobs.) Such jobs may very well feel meaningless, which is a problem. A sense of meaning or purpose is a central component of well-being. Of course, you don’t have to rely on your job for that, but still, spending a third of your waking hours filling in pointless forms in an endless bureaucratic dance will take its toll. (Close to 90% of traditional office workers happily sacrifice salary for meaning - up to a full third of their salary.)

Why did I call this job bloat unsustainable (beyond the immense mental health toll of meaningless work reflected in the burnout boom)?

Let me introduce you to the Peter principle, named after educator Laurence Peter. In short, according to Peter, people rise in a hierarchy to a level of ‘respective incompetence’, or you get promoted until you eventually end up in a job you’re not good at. Sounds like satire, and it was originally intended like that, but it turns out that we can observe the Peter principle at work (pun intended). A 2019 paper on 241 American businesses found indeed that employees doing good work are more likely to be promoted to managerial positions based on their performance in their previous role after which their performance drops precipitously. In other words, the best salesperson does not necessarily make the best manager.

But if we make more and more middle manager positions (Parkinson’s law), and if unsuitable people occupy them (Peter principle) (on average, of course, there are great managers out there), we end up with a bureaucratic dystopia Kafka could have written.

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Hey, thanks for reading. You go and have a wonderful day!

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