Pournell’s Law

In 2006, the coalition forces in Iraq were losing.

The insurgency had forced the coalition to invest too much resources and time into defending the soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen who were in Iraq to seek out, engage with, and destroy the enemy.

Force protection had become its own mission.

In other words, the United States had prioritised using its troops to defend its troops.

You see this in many bureaucracies - particularly in their head offices. Over time, the office grows so much it needs resources just to support its existence. It becomes an organisation within an organisation - with its own hierarchy, policies, and personnel looking inwards to their navels, and insulated from the very organisation it is meant to serve. It snowballs, and is difficult to stop once started. If left too long, there is a generation of workers who only know the head office and how to serve it. If they shift their focus back to the bulk of the organisation, the head office will collapse. This is how they justify themselves.

This phenomenon has been called ‘Pournell’s Iron Law’ after the writer Jerry Pournell who coined it:

In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.

Inexperienced bosses address this simplistically by programming token visits ‘outside the wire’. They may also bring in the non-head office workers to participate in decision making committees. But the outsiders are always outnumbered and intimidated and end up simply advocating for their piece of the organisation. They don’t have the strategic perspective nor incentive to do otherwise. Worse is when the outsider representatives end up dictating to the entire organisation, or at the very least fettering decision making as the head office bosses naively give them too much power in a vain attempt to shift mission focus.

Resolution of this problem begins with good leadership. The first job of a leader is to define reality. The leader begins by identifying those functions that need to be grouped in a single ‘head office’ location, and those that can be performed ‘in the organisation’. This can be achieved either by moving roles out to where the work is done, or training the real workers in those functions. For example, instead of having all the compliance people in head office, put them out in the organisation. Not only do they gain a better operational perspective of the value they can add, they are also more visible to the operational decision makers, who are more likely to call on them than when they sat behind desks in the ivory tower.

There will be resistance. If there isn’t - then the workers would have resolved it themselves.

That’s what leadership is: taking people where they otherwise would not have gone.