The Law of Conservation of Bureaucracy
Bureaucracy is a framework for business processes that emphasizes certain attributes such as control, centralization of decision-making, diffuse accountability, and specialization. In practice, it can be impersonal, slow, brittle, and naturally expansive. We talked about this in a prior post.
Bureaucracy must include an interface between individuals and the system. It is only natural to look for insight to the business of design.
“Tesler’s Law, also known as The Law of Conservation of Complexity, states that for any system there is a certain amount of complexity which cannot be reduced.”
Consider the process of renewing a driver’s license at the Department of Motor Vehicles (“DMV”). This is the exaggerated image of everything that people hate when they refer to bureaucracy. People love to complain about the DMV. Some of them are even funny.
The DMV sees itself as executing an important function related to public safety: certifying individuals as competent and law-abiding operators of vehicles that can have lethal impact if used incorrectly.
They’re correct.
Imagine a world in which we didn’t have driver certification. Using a car, or even a sidewalk, would be much less predictable because one wouldn’t have the comfort (or the pretense) of assuming a minimum level of driver skill. If you could even get insurance, the rates would be higher than what we pay now.
The DMV’s positive social impact is even more pronounced. Think about all the ways in which you verify your identity using your driver’s license. All kinds of economic actors free ride on the public good of the DMV’s efforts to verify basic background information for an individual. During the pandemic, in New York City where I live, restaurants demanded to see not only proof of vaccination but also the diner’s driver’s license to ensure that the person claiming compliance was the same one in the vaccination app.
For all intents and purposes, the DMV is an agency of convenience. We register with the DMV to expedite myriad other interactions in our lives.
Of course, the experience of applying for, obtaining, and maintaining a driver’s license is apocryphally inconvenient. Even when it has been simplified, people still complain about it. The DMV is a cliched punchline to a joke about bureaucracy that people loathe to tell.
I say it’s apocryphal because when I renewed my driver’s license in New York State a couple of years ago, the whole experience from my arrival at their office to my exit took ten minutes. Having shown up fifteen minutes before my appointment, I was out of the building before I was scheduled to start the process.
Returning to Tesler’s Law, now with the context of a tangible example, we can see that there is a fixed amount of complexity to renewing a driver’s license. There are certain tasks that one needs to complete. Someone needs to take your picture, for example. The DMV needs to verify you are who you claim to be by checking other documents that are consistent with your assertion of identity. You must pay a fee, etc.
There are several implications of Tesler’s Law from the perspective of professional design:
· “All processes have a core of complexity that cannot be designed away and therefore must be assumed by either the system or the user.”
· “Ensure as much as possible of the burden is lifted from users by dealing with inherent complexity during design and development.”
· “Take care not to simplify interfaces to the point of abstraction.”
When I write “professional design,” I am referring to the people who perfect user experiences. This is part of a theme I will explore in subsequent posts: the possibility that contemporary technology can obviate bureaucracy.
Combining Tesler’s Law and our earlier description of the attributes of a bureaucratic process, I suggest a Law of Conservation of Bureaucracy: “Bureaucratic processes seek to impose as much complexity as possible on users in order to strengthen and expand the influence of the central authority, even as it diffuses accountability for the system’s shortcomings.”
The corollary of this might actually give us a formal definition of bureaucracy beyond our prior I’ll-know-it-when-I-see-it description.
“A bureaucracy is a system that either imposes an unusually high proportion of its complexity on its users or one that demonstrates an increase in its perceived level of complexity over time.”
Contemporary software includes different types of services to which the program connects with an application programming interface. If the data the program requires already exists elsewhere, then the program will fetch it automatically and invisibly rather than asking the user to perform that task, for example.
One could envisage a driver’s license renewal process that was entirely automatic. The DMV could offer you several choices of photo that their systems pulled from social media, having scanned these services in the background. The DMV could be plugged into the police database to ensure that you have not violated any laws. The DMV could verify your identity by cross-checking it with other government databases, such as those of the state tax authority.
The individual driver might see no complexity whatsoever; their renewed driver’s license would arrive in the post before the expiry of their current version.
Instead, the DMV asks you to bring myriad documents with you and to report for inspection. One reason why I sailed through my renewal was that I had everything with me and I had an appointment at a propitious time of day.
This is an overly simplified example, one that I offer for its familiarity.
But the Law of Conservation of Bureaucracy explains why it inspires such vigorous disdain.