“Bureaucracy was born out of the human desire for complete assurance before taking action” – Scott Belsky in Making Ideas Happen. And this assurance is a very natural desire in humans. As a result, bureaucracy creeps up everywhere and fast and finally prevents us to take action.
This effect is very interesting to observe in particular in the field of Risk Management. It’s all about risk and uncertainty, reactivity and agility to unexpected events… and most risk management processes implemented in organizations are awfully slow and bureaucratic – at a point where the operative executive does not really use them beyond maybe some thoughts once a year when he must or at the start of a Project.
There are quite a few areas where we will never have a complete assurance whatever the effort we will spend, such as predicting the future, including future risks. Bureaucracy is the wrong answer to risk management and future prediction so that any method that implies some of it should be automatically suspiciously classified as an attempt to seek reassurance for ourselves.
Is your risk management process or your future business planning process excessively bureaucratic? You’d better review it immediately because it is most probably not fit for purpose!
