Bureaucrat
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an official who works by fixed routine without exercising intelligent judgment
Dictionary.com
Almost 20 years ago a Polish friend and I were staying at a hostel in Amsterdam. One weekend a friend of hers came for a visit. As he didn’t know how to get to our place by himself, we went to the train station to wait for him. His train came and went – and he was not on it. We were concerned because he did not speak Dutch or English and would have a difficult time navigating Amsterdam on his own. We were also worried that he had gotten lost.
We decided to check with the information desk– which had access to the schedule of trains for all of the Netherlands– and would be able to check with other stations to see if they had heard from a confused Polish speaking young man. We figured that he did one of three things; he could have gotten off of the train too early, stayed on the train past the correct station, or missed his train entirely.
These seemed like reasonable possibilities to us. However the rude women in the ticket booth did not think so. She looked at us incredulously and told us in a snotty tone of voice that all of these scenarios were “IMPOSSIBLE.”
This struck me as a rather odd thing to say– since train tickets are not checked when you board (like they do with planes.) Sometimes it would be hours and many stops before a conductor would come around to punch the tickets. This lack of control made these three things at least possible if not common.
We left the station defeated. I can not remember the exact details of what happened– but the missing train-goer did managed to track down my friend later that evening. But the interaction with the information agent at the train station has remained fixed in my brain. It was a defining moment with a true Bureaucrat.
That woman sat all day in a small glass booth answering the same small set of questions again and again. While she worked in a train station and likely occasionally took a train herself – she had no concept of what the system looked like to others, or how the system could be broken.
She lived in a myopic world, not able to imagine life beyond the glass in front of her. She was trained to deal with a specific set of circumstance and anything outside of that set became inconceivable. In the real world people miss their trains everyday, they get off at the wrong stop all the time. But in her world trains came on time, left on time, and always carried the correct amount of passengers. And as a Bureaucrat she did not have the inclination to seek out solutions to a problem she had not previously encountered.
A Bureaucrat is someone who has become completely compartmentalized. They live, think, and breath 100% “IN THE BOX.” Anything out of the limited known realm is not just unlikely it is actually “Impossible.”
As such, a person who is a Bureaucrat cannot be forward thinking in a society that is dynamic. They can only look at the past to see what has already occurred, and even then they can only analyze what has happened through the lens of their small myopic world.
We run into Bureaucrats in our every day lives. They are not just in government jobs. I’ve seen them working at super markets, running restaurants, and volunteering at churches. While they are not just in government jobs– our government agencies are structured to create, nurture, and build Bureaucrats. It takes an enormous amount of energy to buck the standard, to think outside of the box, and to risk using creativity to solve problems.
Our society is more dynamic that at anytime in its past. Twitter, text messaging, flash mobs, online communities, blogging, email, forums, Second Life, and YouTube are just some examples of how things are changing. If government agencies intend to be forward thinking with their programs and their priorities, they need to change their structures to enable their employees to shed their Bureaucratic tendencies.
