What Shoe Bombers Tell Us About Office Bureaucracy
After D.B. Cooper parachuted out the aft end of a Boeing 727 jet in 1971 clutching a $200,000 ransom, he was never found. But federal aviation authorities prevented similar getaways in the future by locking down the rear stairway of commercial airliners during flight.
Similarly, officials installed heavy doors between flight crews and passengers to avoid a repeat of the 9-11 attacks. When alleged "shoe bomber" Richard Reid was apprehended, passengers quickly found themselves subject to shoe checks before boarding. And security authorities are now buying whole-body scanners by the dozen to prevent liquid explosives from being snuck on board under clothing.
What these solutions did was fix the problem at hand, but not without costs, namely longer lines at airports, increased ticket prices, and loss of privacy. You can argue this approach is not sustainable, that at some point all these "fixes" will discourage people from flying at all.
The same things happen in our own businesses when the powers-that-be enact a new policy or process to right a perceived wrong. Ron Ashkenas writes brilliantly on this paradox, offering up the example of a factory that had experienced the theft of a box of gloves used by high-speed lathe operators.
To prevent further losses, the factory requires operators, when their gloves wear out, to shut down their machines, truck over to another building, fill out a form, and show a clerk the worn out pair to get new ones. You might imagine that it costs the factory much more to shut down operations during these periods than the value of the gloves lost, not to mention the fact it makes its employees feel like they can't be trusted. Observes Askenas:
"While this kind of organizational response does indeed prevent the recurrence of the exact same negative instance ... the accumulation of these 'reactive' controls often creates complexity, confusion, and unnecessary cost. Even worse, the new controls usually don't prevent future incidents of a different kind from occurring."What can an organization do to prevent this insanity? He recommends periodic reviews of controls to see if they have become counterproductive over time. Perhaps they can be done away with, or a better solution created.
Read his post on HBR.org, Do Your Controls Create Complexity?
Have you see this happen at your own workplace? Give us an example of bureaucracy gone wild.