The End of Bureaucracy

The End of Bureauocracy

And it was, that Jethro, the Midian priest and father-in-law of Moses came to Moses and said:

"Bro, you look like shit, did you even take a break today?"

And Moses replied:

"My brother, the people require my leadership and judgement, they wait in line all day for me to resolve their conflicts and weigh on matters of import. With fourty thousand of us living together in the desert, I have to manage resources, keep the peace, and resolve interpersonal conflicts. I have the divine provenance they trust, and with everyone receiving impartial justice from a single source of truth, they know they are getting fair treatment."

"When we first entered the dessert, your office hours would be finished before the morning Mun had been gathered. Now I see you work late, past the evening sacrifices. This system won't scale."

"Brother, what am I to do?"

"Tell you what", said Jethro, "Do you really need to weigh judgement on every single case? Aren't some cases common and repetitive, or simple that a man of great wisdom -- appointed by you the holder of Divine Provenance -- could follow your precedents and pass judgement the same way you would 95% of the time?"

"I suppose one could."

"Then you must appoint 70 wise men, the wisest from all the tribes of Israel, and our decision throughput will increase 70-fold while retaining 95% satisfaction rates. You, Moses, can still take the most difficult and novel cases, and we shall have an appeal process to recoup the 5% loss of quality".

And so it was, that 70 wise men were chosen from the tribes of Israel, and they passed judgement on the people, and Moses could devote more time to further contemplating the commandments of God".

A generation passed, and the people of Israel mutiplied, and their needs for administration grew. Each wise man appointed 70 honorable men, to each honorable man there were 70 respectable men, and to each respectable man there were 70 dependable men.

And it was that Moses came to Jethro and said:

"My brother, I have followed your advice and delegated decision-making to a vast pyramid, rivaling those we built for Pharaoh. I and my wise men are as busy as ever and yet the people still wait all day for judgement. There are not enough men in the camp, even of dubious character, to complete another rank in our hierarchy, and even if there were, then who would be left to burn the daily sacrifices?"

And Jethro responded,

"Yes, the system can only scale so far before dimishing returns set in. While you increase the number of frontline workers 70x, every new layer increases the overall operational overhead. Some cases need to work their way through all the levels which may be suffering from inefficient bottlenecks and coodination complexity."

"Then Brother, what shall I do?"

"Why, if we can't scale horizontally, we'll have to scale vertically. Rather than adding more workers, let's allow each worker to process more requests per day. I noticed that at every stage, petitioners have to repeat their story, in all of its detail, to the next judge. This wastes time, if we can gather all the data pertaining to each case up-front, and record it on paper, then judges can review them asynchronously and add details for later judges to review."

So Moses appointed clerks who recorded all the details of every complaint and request, and categorized them, and routed them to the appropriate judge. In their wisdom, they noticed the same information was needed, and formalized their records so they were consistent in the eyes of God.

Generations passed, the people of Israel multiplied, as did the volume and variety of forms.

And it was that Moses came to Jethro and said:

"Oh Brother! I am seeing your dminishing returns again! The scribes write until their hands cramp and still the people wait. The judges pass judgement swiftly, yet stand idle behind a wall of clerks who cannot write fast enough"

And Jethro replied

"Easy, we shall move the burden of form-filling onto the people."

"But the people are not clerks."

"Being a clerk can't be that hard. If they do a bad job, we can just tell them to do it again and eventually they'll get it right."

And so the people became clerks. The forms grew, and shrank, twisted into wires and flew like lightning from tree to tree, bouncing to the stars and back and still people waited all day for judgement and spent more time as a clerk than they felt they deserved.

And Moses had had enough of his father-in-law, the Midian priest. He fasted for three days and three nights, he purified himself in holy waters, and approached God.

"Oh God, you gave me your Wisdom so that I may judge the Israelites, your chosen people, and finding the burden too great, I shared your wisdom and delegated the task of judgements to others who could do it almost as well as me. Now this system has grown to strangle us all yet we know no other way of supporting these tribes which worship you and have multiplied to be great in number like the sands of the sea and the stars in the sky."

And God said "Go out in the desert and hit a rock with your staff. It will speak as you would speak and listen as you would listen, and it shall judge the people as you would judge the people with My Wisdom."

And Moses said "Wait, so I speak to the rock and you'll make it a copy of my mind".

And God said "Speaking to rocks is for water, hitting rocks does the mind copy".

So Moses went into the desert and duplicated his mind until every person had a rock that they could consult for instant resolution of their disputes and complaints. Each time it was as if they walked to the top of the pyramid and recieved judgement directly from Moses himself. They could explain their situation once and not need to fill out a form or learn how to classify their complaint in order to reach the appropriate representative. They shed their call trees and were free.