Going from a small Vermont town to a big European city is quite the transition, but it’s nothing like going from self-employment to working in a massive governmental organization like the Department of Defense. There’s so much that changes, from the level of autonomy to the multitude of processes, but also the intangibles, like corporate culture and incentive structures. We often talk about the negatives of bureaucracy in this environment, but I’ve come to learn that sometimes the beast of bureaucracy is actually enabling our efforts to be both successful and sustainable at scale.
As a reservist, I often bounce in and out of this corporatized government world, and it always takes some time to readjust. Similarly, a start-up will also face these kinds of challenges as it tries to scale up. What works with a team of six doesn’t necessarily work with a department of six hundred. Successful organizations must basically re-invent themselves every time they grow. Even when an idea is good, and the market is right, it may fail simply because the organizing structure behind it failed to grow with it.
Bureaucracy in government tends to manifest as friction in the gears. Sometimes, it’s as mundane as trying to find someone in the big DoD address book that we call “the Global”— just imagine trying to look up a Sergeant Johnson across the entire military enterprise.
Other times, it’s more deliberate, like additional reporting requirements because Congress or some other level of authority (of which there are many), want to offer guidance or ask a question.
And of course, sometimes the bureaucracy is there just because someone screwed it up in the past— “don’t operate a government vehicle until you’ve done x, y, and z training because once upon a time someone did something stupid and somebody got hurt or cost the government a bunch of money”.
The truth is bureaucracy isn’t all bad. In fact, bureaucracy is the only thing that makes sustained scale possible. An organized structure provides a framework so that when information and decisions need to flow from one level to another, everyone knows the process. When communication channels are ad hoc, only a fraction of the team remains in the loop, making it impossible for disparate parts of a huge organization to work in unison.
Over the last few months, I’ve come to realize that the U.S. Special Operations community is particularly susceptible to these maladies. This community shuns bureaucracy because it maintains the spirit of a small operational team. In the meantime, it’s budget and staffing have exploded, but its organizational culture hasn’t figured out how to behave like a big organization.
For example, Special Operations commands, like many Silicon Valley start-ups, like to talk about being “flat”. They believe that hierarchies are cumbersome, and their missions are best served by simply going around them. This may work on the ground, but it quickly falls apart as the organization grows. Any micro-managing founder will tell you that the hardest and most-important step to scaling is being able to let go and delegate tasks to trusted subordinates.
Traditional services like the Army and Navy rely more heavily on old military hierarchies and formal communication channels. I’ve been surprised to find that people in the special operations community call each other by first names instead of ranks, and readily subvert chains of command in order to “flatten comms” and “just get things done”. It all feels so temporary, with little regard for long-term mission sustainment.
As an entrepreneur, I love and respect individual initiative and propensity for action, but as a sailor, I also recognize that large organizations require a lot of collective effort, and sometimes choreography, in order to maintain effectiveness at scale. Flat is great, flat is simple, but sooner or later, you need to learn to build up.