From Generation X by Douglas Coupland:
Power Mist : the tendency of hierarchies in office environments to be diffuse and preclude crisp articulation. (page 25)
I hate the Power Mist. The Power Mist is bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is a hydra.
The Power Mist is one of the reasons why bureaucracies are evil. They have a unifying goal that is created by a specific group of people (typically shareholders) and then the means to accomplish this is smeared across the organization. Departments are set up to specialize on specific tasks, for efficiency, and communications within the bureaucracy slows down.
As Malcolm Gladwell suggests in his book The Tipping Point, at some particular point (~150 people) the bureaucracy grows so large that individuals become disconnected, they feel like they cannot make a difference. It becomes impersonal.
Bureaucracies are nasty to outsiders when they become impersonal; everybody has their story about getting transferred between departments when calling about a mistake the corporate made.
Bureaucracies can also be nasty to the people inside, too. I’ve got my stories of running into an internal policy that was just plain stupid and showed a total lack of understanding of human psychology and compassion. If you worked at a Big Company, I’m certain you have one too…
The problem, the one that makes me rage and scream, is when you try to do the right thing and you just encounter this big mushy power distribution. Answers I love to hate include: Oh, I can’t do that and I’m not sure who can; Why would you want to do that?; The industry surveys say that this is fair/accurate/best practice.; We can’t anticipate the effects of changing our process on other departments, so we can’t change; I’ll need to get my manager(s) to approve this before I send it out.
It goes on forever. Cut off one head, another appears. The power doesn’t collect and direct. It simply drifts, and then attacks again.
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