Bureaucratic Blunders

My second argument for the listeriosis accident pertains to the inflexible bureaucratic rules which stifle human judgment and common sense. Now I don't know how accurate the news reports are about the actual happenings of the food inspectors of the private company or of the government inspectors. Who knew what when and where is often difficult to ascertain in the context of the next news report let alone a full investigation. I also know that the bureaucracy has an internal confidentiality to prevent anyone outside the in-group to know what actually goes on. No one on the inside of the bureaucratic machine will inform the external observer unless the external observer asks very precise questions, and no external observer can ever know what precise questions to ask to get the answers sought. The bureaucrat will not volunteer information because of confidentiality clauses and will only answer the properly filled out requests on the appropriate forms during the appropriate times.

But to get back to the listeriosis issue and the news, I did hear about an interesting development. Apparently, there was appropriate testing done by the private company. The testing was done on the work stations themselves and when the bacteria was found, the entire work station was cleaned up immediately. That's great and efficient on their part, but; and this is where the bureaucratic rules come in to stifle common sense, they never bothered to inspect the food products themselves. After all, aren't the government inspectors responsible for that? "Not my department, my bureaucratic rules say to clean workstation B if bacteria is found on workstation B. Why would I check to see if any of the food has been contaminated? There are no rules written for that!"

I can understand that bureaucratic instructions can cover many routine situations and help to train people to make proper decisions. But we seem to have placed these rules above human ingenuity and human judgment. The rules we create should be there to serve our interests not the other way around. We don't create rules so that we can eliminate our independence and end up being servants of what we created. Assuming that the news reports accurately depicted the situation (and having seen some bureaucratic blunders with my own eyes in the areas I have worked), this is an indication of allowing the bureaucratic regulations to dictate actions that go opposite common sense with the obvious results.

Once a person has been trained to use the bureaucratic rules and that he knows them implicitly, then that person should be encouraged to throw the rules away. Lets take a lesson from military strategy, the goal of military strategy is to achieve an objective with the least amount of damage to oneself. To do this, plans are made that covers every single possible contingency, you are expected to memorize every military precept, every potential contingency and be ready to follow every section of the plan precisely...... then, as soon as battle commences, every great strategist from Sun Tzu to Clausewitz and beyond, all agree on one thing: you throw every plan away after the first few seconds of the battle and use your human judgment to carry on. Otherwise, disaster strikes.

So this accident could have been averted if someone would have just thought for three seconds; that perhaps if the work station was contaminated, then perhaps one should spend a small amount of money to inspect some of the food as well and see if it has been contaminated. Don't expect that the other department would catch it in time, don't rely on the bureaucratic rules to avoid doing the right thing because you hope that every contingency has been covered. Well, as the news reports claim, the inspection of the food products were not carried out by the private company and by the time the government inspectors came to the food itself, the damage had already been done. With a much higher cost to the private company than what he would have had to pay if he would have just thought about it for three seconds and not cut corners. Is this another side-effect of capitalism gone wild?