The Bureaucracy's Management Fetish

There was an interesting piece in the Toronto Star (The Treasury Board’s inefficient mission for efficiency, June 25, 2012) concerning a recent Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS) initiative to spur innovation in the civil service of Canada.  The article points out how an exercise to achieve greater efficiency in the civil service became hopelessly inefficient. 

The TBS basically oversees all of the bureaucracy of Canada; the civil service of the civil service if you will.  The Canadian public service includes about 200 departments, agencies and crown corporations comprising about 283,000 bureaucrats (about 0.83% of the population).  It's the biggest organization in the country.

This particular initiative involved offering civil servants cash-money if they could come up with innovative ideas that would save the government money.  It looked god on paper.  Anyone, in theory, could float an idea.  If the idea didn't result in policy changes and if it saved more money than the actual award, a worker bee in the hive could walk off with $10,000.

I've worked in large bureaucracies most of my career.  And of course, since I basically inhabit the philososphere, I spend a lot of time thinking about how they operate. Here in Afghanistan I have occasion to study the most advanced form of this particular phylum: the multi-national military environment.

As an environmental scientist, I've likened the bureaucracy to essentially a kind of ecosystem, filled with creatures that have adapted over time to survive and thrive in this unnatural environment.

The bureaucrat in his natural habitat.

In a true ecosystem, innovation and competition are the engines of survival.  But, of course, the civil service, being the government, has no one to compete against, and no clear bottom line against which to measure its success.  In theory, success should be measured by the satisfaction of the people of Canada.  In practice, since it is ostensibly run by politicians, it's also about getting the ruling party reelected.

It’s a very centrally-controlled, hierarchical structure.  Information flows very well from the top down, but not so well from the bottom up.  Now, we've known since the days of Adam Smith's The Wealth Of Nations that a centrally controlled economy is much more inefficient than a distributed economy where individual agents act in their own interest—enlightened self-interest is the term Smith used.  It seems intuitive to me that the same would apply to an organization.

The mandarins of the civil service are concerned with consistency and control, retaining decision-making ability at the top.  To my mind, you can't have that and expect an innovative workforce.  Innovation is grown, not imposed.  It arises from individuals coming up with a new idea so that they can do their job more efficiently or effectively, and that idea catching on with others.  In nature, most innovations—normally manifesting as genetic mutations—don't work.  Now and then, however, you get one that increases the fitness of an individual making it more likely to survive and procreate, passing on the innovation to the next generation.

I'm not blaming the mandarins or the politicians.  I firmly believe that Canada, being a democracy, gets exactly the civil service it deserves.  As implied above, innovative ideas often fail.  The media, being the media, don't report on successful civil service innovations, or successful anything for that matter.  

(The media report bad news, not good news.  Perhaps the same reason Shakespeare's tragedies are considered more important than his comedies.  Why?  Some aspect of human nature. Perhaps it's a built-in efficiency of our minds.  Why waste precious conscious thought on what's going right; it's what's going wrong that you, from a survival standpoint, needs to know.)

Sorry—drifted off there.  Anyway the media will be all over the screw-ups like a pack of starving chihuahuas on a pork chop.  And since politicians who get bad press tend not to get re-elected, you end up with a pathologically risk-averse organization.

The folly of those on top, I think, is having the hubris to think that they can change this.

I've always been impressed with the caliber of people who rise to the top of bureaucracies.  I've found the General Officers here in Afghanistan to be competent and sharp.  The government bureaucracy I worked for in Canada, similarly, seemed to me to have very able and hard-working people in the higher echelons.

But the system they presume to run is not dead.  To continue my ecosystem analogy, it is very much alive.  Look at the common etymology of the words "organization" and "organism." The senior managers may be the conscious brain of this organism, but they overestimate the importance of the conscious brain.  Even in a human, with the most advanced brain function in the animal kingdom, the conscious mind is far more limited than we assume.

We can't tell our heart to stop beating, our lungs to stop breathing.  We can't turn off our fear of heights or love of strawberries.  Even to stop a habit like drumming your fingers when your bored takes a supreme and sustained effort.  You can decide not to act gay, perhaps, but you cannot decide not to be gay.  The base motivations that drive us bubble up from some primordial id that we do not understand.  Many of the decisions we think we make, we don’t actually make, or, put another way, we can do what we will, but we cannot will what we will.

In other words, the brain of the human organism or the civil service organization does not control in the manner we commonly think it does—rationally collecting, processing and analyzing information.  What's more, the human organism's sensors relay accurate information to your brain, for the most part.  Imagine if your eyes only transmitted information it thought your brain wanted to see.  This is frequently what happens in large organizations.

It is, in fact, very difficult to change who you are in any fundamental way, and similarly it is very difficult to change what the civil service is. 

In the government, for example, Human Resources reform has been a perennial fixture in attempts to transform the bureaucracy.  It's takes too long to hire people.  It's difficult to fire people.  Annual evaluations are a resource-intensive paper exercise.  The thicket of rules, regulations and policies is stultifying.  And yet, despite these bright and determined people at the top, and despite their stated desire to make HR more effective and responsive, HR remains essentially the same beast it was in the 60s when it was called Personnel. 

And all the management models of the past forty years—Quality Management, Learning Organization, Results Measurement, Change Management—hang like hunting trophies in the corridors of the TBS, and yet the civil service is essentially the same animal it has been for decades, heck centuries (the word Byzantine, meaning unnecessarily complicated, comes from the royal court of Byzantium).

The reason the civil service is the same as it always has been is because it is adapted to its environment, and, because it is adapted, it resists change.  The reaction to this resistance is for the "brain" of the organization to introduce more neurons (managers).  They’ve made a fetish out of management: time management, people management, project management, crisis management, process management, information management.  The resulting level of control at the worker bee level is simply not conducive to innovative thinking. To quote T.H. White, "Everything not forbidden is compulsory."

So what's the answer?  Who knows.  I'm great at pointing out problems; not so hot about doing anything about them.  Maybe I'll introduce a new fad called Organic Management and make millions.  Treat your company like a garden.  Like Chauncey Gardner said in the 1979 classic film Being There.

P.S. Rats!  Just did quick Google and there's already whole slew of "Organic Management" websites.  So much for that get-rich-quick scheme,

The Is: The SImulated Universe

OK, back to the war and that means back to the blog. 

In our last  few chats we've been discussing the idea of parallel universes.  First of all we considered if the universe we inhabit is infinite.  If it is, then the particular collection of atoms in our solar system must be exactly recreated elsewhere, if you just travel far enough.  On average, if you walk about a googolplex steps, you'll find another identical solar system with another you sitting there reading this blog (except for the fact that, being identical to you, he also took off to see what his doppleganger was up to in another part of the infinite universe).

We talked about string theory briefly, and how our mathematical laws and constants are, according to string theory, based on the topology multi-dimensional strings and branes, and that those topologies allow for, at present, the possibility of around 10⁵⁰⁰ (that's a one with 500 zeroes after it) different kinds of universes with physical laws that may differ radically from what we know.

We talked about the quantum multiverse.   Evidence shows that subatomic particles tend to exist as probability waves and when they are observed, all the other probabilities collapse except for the thing that actually happens. But what if each of those probabilities doesn’t collapse?  What if, upon observation, each possibility realizes itself in a parallel universe, and thus billions of new universes are being created each nanosecond for every single possible outcome of a quantum event.

The last type of parallel universe we will discuss is the simulated universe.   If you are in tune to pop culture at all, you already know what this is:

Sorry, which pill was which again?

One of the largest supercomputers in the world, Blue Gene, is presently doing a passable job of effectively simulating a tiny portion of a rat's brain, about the size of a pinhead.  It's modeling about 10,000 neurons comprising some 10 million neural connections.  Big deal,  say you?

Why sure, it's a far cry form the 100 billion or so neurons we have in our head, comprising trillions of neural connections and operating at about 100 trillion operations per second.  But when you take into account the astounding progress in computing ability, the project's leader, neuroscientist Henry Markram, figures that we'll be effectively modeling a human brain by about 2023.

Let's keep moving.  Let's say that we get a handle on quantum computing in the next few decades or so.  An effective quantum-based computer the size of a laptop could not only model a human brain, it could model every thought of every human ever in a fraction of a second.  So computing power isn't really an issue, barring a zombie apocalypse.

 If you've got a machine that can effectively model a human brain, shouldn't you be able to simulate people?  Well, now we're out of the cut-and-dried world of circuits and into the more ethereal realm of epistemology.  Would your simulation think and feel the same way you do,?  Would it be self-aware?  Or is their some ineffable quality to consciousness that lies beyond the ken of mere computation?

This an active and interesting area of research in epistemology, and one perhaps we'll discuss in a later Mindfingers post.  But let's say for the time being that, for the purposes of any human interrogation, we cannot differentiate between you and your simulation.  That is, if we put each of you in a locked room and asked questions by slipping pieces of paper under the door, there is nothing we could ask that would allow us to tell you apart from your simulation (known as the Turing Test for artificial intelligence).

So now we have human mind simulations that you can't tell from the real thing.  After that it would be child's play to simulate a physical universe for these minds to live in, with stars in the heavens and gravity and clouds and viruses.  In essence, you've created a parallel universe.  Unless you decide to tell the simulated beings in your model that you are there, they would more or less be in the same situation we're in--looking around and wondering what they are doing there.  This seems much easier than creating an actual parallel universe, and the forces involved with that.

If we could create one of these simulated universes, there is nothing to stop us from creating several.  We could play with them and try out different things.  Perhaps, in the future, we could even find a way to live in them ourselves.  And we might have at some point millions of these simulated universes.  A few on every laptop.

So here's the thing.  In the vastness of The Is (my name, recall, for the multiverse), do we honestly think that we are the first life form ever to become this technologically advanced?  Indeed, it would seem likely to the point of almost certainty that civilizations elsewhere had or have reached our level of technology and beyond.  And if that's the case, they've already discovered this idea of simulated universes too.  Perhaps millions of intelligences elsewhere in The Is have already created simulated universes..

Not only that, but these simulated universes, being more or less perfect-fidelity copies of the real ones, could have simulated inhabitants that themselves create simulated universes with simulated inhabitants, who may in turn create their simulated universes.  In this scenario you end up with simulated universes vastly outnumbering "real" ones.

Following that thread of logic, if simulated universes are far more probable than real ones, then it follows that it is far more probable that we ourselves are living in a simulated universe than a "real" one.

In the immortal word of Keanu Reeves: Whoa!

So with our potentially infinite universe, parallel universes from other Big Bangs, alternate universes possible in string theory, the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics and simulated universes, we have a vast multiverse beyond our furthest imagining.  Infinities upon infinities of universes.

There is only one step left.  What if the multiverse simply comprises everything.   There is nothing that isn't. No matter how far-fetched your imagining, it is out there right now.  Harry Potter living on Privet Drive.  A universe composed of nothing; not empty, but nothing.  A universe where pi = 4.  A universe like ours, but running backwards.  An entire multiverse ruled by a omniscient, omnipotent God. 

The Is.

If you're interested in this kind of stuff, I highly recommend Brian Greene's book The Hidden Reality.