When my Uncle Steve was in the Army he managed a warehouse. He was responsible for ordering and shipping supplies and managing inventory.

I say he “managed a warehouse”, but actually he managed two warehouses, an official one that belonged to the official Army supply network and a second unofficial gray-market warehouse that was part of a second network supplied by mistakes made by the official supply network’s. And because the official supply network did little but make mistakes, this second supply network was quite robust.

Due to the enormous number of procedures imposed on the network to guarantee maximum reliability and efficiency, the network was impossibly complicated, unreliable and inefficient. And that was the easy part. The processes involved in correcting a fuck-up was ten times more complicated, error-prone and slower than the process of generating a fresh fuck-up.

So, according to Uncle Steve, whenever he was forced to do things the Right Way the official warehouse system would invariably take aeons to complete his order and send him none of what he needed. Instead of attempting to correct the error, he would simply accept the incorrect order, put it into his second warehouse. He’d then use his second supply network to get what he needed a hundred times more reliably in one-hundredth the time.

At some point Uncle Steve started to collect mis-procured Jeep parts, a la “One Piece at a Time”. Soon, he’d assembled an entire vehicle. However, Uncle Steve made one strategic mistake that I feel sure he never regretted: he painted his new Army Jeep high-gloss olive. This extravagant touch attracted the attention of a general who immediately confiscated it for his own use.

The moral of this fable: The Right Way and the Effective Way of getting shit done is not necessarily the same. But even success is won despite the Right Way, once a success is won, the proponents of the Right Way will confiscate the success.

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Note, proponents of the Right Way confiscate successes as triumphs of the Right Way without the slightest curiosity about how the accomplishment was accomplished.

However, if shit goes wrong the proponents of the Right Way immediately look for deviations from Standard Procedure to explain why things went wrong.

Thus, due to the overwhelming power of selective curiosity, successes are always credited to the Right Way, and failures are always blamed on deviation from the Right Way — when if fact the only role the Right Way really plays in any success being as negligent, ineffectual and otherwise nonexistent as possible.

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When a practice is understood (rightly or wrongly) to bring about success, that practice is imposed for the purpose of bringing about further successes. Unfortunately, we’re not all that scrupulous about establishing cause and effect. We see a rough correlation of (appearance of) practice and success, ascribe a cause, then prescribe a “best practice”.

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Most of the practices to which we attribute our successes sheer bullshit. They’re confabulated after the fact. The real heavy lifting in most successes is done by tacit know-how and intuition. But the bitch of tacit and intuitive things is they’re non verbal, so they tend to have trouble finding the words to account for their successes — or even to claim credit.

So the minute a success is scored, the analytical mind — who is never at a loss for words, who is always ready with an explanation — swoops in and takes full credit. It doesn’t stop there, either. The analytical mind goes on to argue (because that’s what the analytical mind does best) that since this success is proof of its powers, it is qualifications to dictate how work is done in the future. Look at “its” track record.

And it is useless to argue. First, who does it argue to? To tacit know-how? To intuition? No, it argues to other analytical minds, ravenous for explanations and arguments. And these analytical minds believe that the strongest argument and the most comprehensible explanation is obviously the truest ones.

So what most expedient is for everyone to just pretend to do things the right way. They continue doing things the way that works — tacitly and intuitively — and they just let the analytical mind take credit and build its bogus track record.

So it goes. And everything runs just fine as long as the analytical mind stays content with arguing, explaining and taking credit and leaves everyone alone to do what they do…

Generally, however, the analytical mind eventually cannot resist the impulse to cash in its credits for power — the impulse to step in and dictate how things are done, which means to impose processes and standard metrics, to increase the stringency of certifications, blah, blah, blah.

That’s when shit goes pear-shaped. Bureaucratic chickenshit overgrows failing institutions like kudzu, darkening, encumbering and smothering out all vitality in the name of rigor, resulting in more failure, justifying more miserable chickenshit, and on and on. If the institution happens to be a commercial one, it will be fortunate enough to die. If it is public funded, it will drive away all talent until what is left resembles… well, a government agency.

Wherever you hear a lot of howling about failing systems, and the need to tighten up on process, putting in place metrics and accountability and so on, you can bet that’s what’s going on.

The solution administrators usually come up with to solve the problem is: more administration.