Blinding Them with Science

We can reverse bureaucracy.

The movie Greyhound is excellent. Its portrayal of the action on the bridge comes across as technically accurate.

Consider this short snippet showing the ship’s engagement of a submarine.

The smooth working of the team in conveying information under extreme pressure is key here. Every man performs at his peak; all the parts fit together frictionlessly. The Captain retains focus. This is life-and-death stuff. They are committed to a single outcome: the destruction of the German U-Boat.

It’s poetry. It’s Magic Johnson’s no-look pass to Michael Jordan in the Olympics for the dunk.

You see this kind of efficiency in the military. They execute highly engineered processes with the kind of precise coordination learned on the sports field and imbibed through a culture of watching the NBA and the NFL and MLB.

Think of this as pure process.

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Yet, ironically, the military can also be some of the must frustrating, mind-numbing bureaucracy with form-filling and stupid rules.

There is a spectrum between pure process and pure bureaucracy. The military as an institution seems to exist in a super-positioned cultural state where it is both things at the same time. People argue for their own purposes that the military is all process or all bureaucracy. Their arguments fail to explain the observed behavior. It’s only when we think of the organizational light as both a particle and a wave that we can begin to understand and predict its behavior.

Consider now the diminished capacity of our largest bureaucracies. Here’s Democracy talking about the newfound interest in abundance:

‘The Empire State Building, then the world’s tallest building at 102 stories, was completed in 1931. Building that majestic structure, later called one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World by the American Society of Civil Engineers, took just one year and 45 days. Contrast that with just about anything we try to build now. And it’s not just speed. In the 1970s, 1.7 million new homes were constructed each year. Since 2021, with a population that’s more than 50 percent larger and an ongoing housing crisis, we’ve built only 1.4 million new homes a year. Or consider major legislation. Medicare was signed into law on July 30, 1965. Less than one year later, sign-ups were already available, with elderly beneficiaries just needing to mail back a single card. In our time, Medicare was expanded in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act to allow for the negotiation of common prescription drug prices. However, the new prices for the ten drugs it will cover won’t come fully online until 2026, just in time for President Trump to take credit for them going into the midterms.

‘Something has changed. Whether it is transit and infrastructure projects that seem to take forever or new laws that take years to go into effect, the government now moves much more sluggishly than in decades past.’

Things are getting more difficult.

It’s as if all processes fall somewhere on the spectrum between pure process and pure bureaucracy, but they are prone to sliding over time towards bureaucracy. Instead of imagining the spectrum as a level line, it’s tilted towards bureaucracy.

Things never become less bureaucratic; they either stay the same, or they become more bureaucratic over time.

Even the Navy has its issues with the flow of information on the modern bridge. The time-tested seamanship and professionalism of its men and women has attenuated.

‘On 21 August 2017, the USS John S. McCain (DDG-56) collided with the Liberian-flagged tanker Alnic MC off the coast of Singapore and Malaysia, killing 10 US sailors. This ship is a sister ship to the Fitzgerald, operated in the same squadron (Destroyer Squadron 15), and had the same home port of Yokosuka, Japan.

‘On 23 August 2017, commander of the US Seventh Fleet, Vice Admiral Joseph Aucoin, was relieved from his duties^[44] a few weeks before his planned retirement date following four collisions within a year involving Seventh Fleet warships. On 18 September 2017, the new commander of the US Seventh Fleet, Vice Admiral Phillip Sawyer, as part of the investigations into four surface ship incidents involving Navy ships in the Western Pacific in 2017, including the collision involving Fitzgerald, ordered that Rear Admiral Charles Williams, Commander, Task Force 70 (CTF 70)/Carrier Strike Group 5, and Captain Jeffrey Bennett, commodore of Destroyer Squadron 15, be removed from their positions due to a loss of confidence in their ability to command.’

In a physical system, like a container of gas molecules or water, temperature is a measure of the average energy of its particles. Higher temperature means more energy to do things. For example, in a steam engine, we have a boiler that heats water to make steam. The particles in the steam move faster creating greater pressure within the container with more potential energy to push a piston. The temperature represents the amount of energy available to do the work of moving the train down the tracks.

Entropy is a measure of the unpredictability of the system. As the temperature increases, the particles move faster and they are distributed more randomly. We would have a more difficult time identifying the position and velocities of steam particles than when they were water particles.

Intuitively, high temperature systems have high entropy. If we add heat to the system, things become more unpredictable and entropy increases. This change in entropy is a function of how much energy we add, scaled by the temperature; adding the same amount of energy to a low temperature system will have more marginal bang for the buck than adding it to a high temperature system.

In our Navy example, in Greyhound, we unusually have a great deal of energy combined with low entropy. We know exactly where everyone is supposed to be, what they should be doing, and when. It’s predictable. Anyone who has spent time on the bridge of an anti-submarine warship would know that scene in their bones.

Think of it like a laser: a highly ordered set of photons, all with the same frequency and direction, but containing great energy. It has impact. It is focused. This is a physical analog for the effectiveness of our bridge and ops team in Greyhound.

We can have high entropy combined with low temperature. There is something called “amorphous ice.”

‘Researchers at UCL and the University of Cambridge have discovered a new type of ice that more closely resembles liquid water than any other known ices and that may rewrite our understanding of water and its many anomalies.

‘The newly discovered ice is amorphous – that is, its molecules are in a disorganised form, not neatly ordered as they are in ordinary, crystalline ice. Amorphous ice, although rare on Earth, is the main type of ice found in space. That is because in the colder environment of space, ice does not have enough thermal energy to form crystals.’

Here’s what ChatGPT told me about the Second Law of Thermodynamics:

‘The second law of thermodynamics states that the total entropy of an isolated system (the system plus its surroundings) always increases over time for irreversible processes. This law highlights the fundamental difference between reversible and irreversible processes, especially in terms of entropy.’

Heat always flows from hot objects to cooler ones; this process is irreversible without external intervention.

Putting it all together, for too long our institutions have been isolated systems in which efficiency has dissipated, flowing from the pure process end of the spectrum towards the bureaucratic kluge part. This flow is one way. It has been irreversible because there has been no external action upon it. Institutional entropy only increases. The system has cooled into a high entropy/low temperature quagmire of inept frustration.

Bureaucratic entropy doesn’t have to be irreversible. Leadership and duty can turn the tide.

It happens in every organization. Here’s the former Snowflake CEO, a remarkably successful executive, discussing it in the technology sector.

‘One problem he’s seen with young CEOs: “They just think, ‘I hire a bunch of people, and then I sit back and wait for greatness.’ They have no idea that they have to relentlessly drive every second of the day, every interaction, and seek the confrontation,” Slootman told the No Priors podcast in an episode posted Thursday.

‘Look no further than a DMV office to see a lack of urgency among worker, he suggested. “This is what naturally happens to human beings,” he said. “It’s innate. We slow down to a glacial pace unless there are people who are going to drive the tempo and pace and intensity and urgency. That’s what leaders need to do.”

‘CEOs must constantly “push the urgency,” he said, even though “it’s really hard to have the mental energy to bring that to every single instance of today.”’

Our systems are reversible but it requires leadership and vision and energy and conflict and confrontation.