Bulldozer00's Blog

Orgs of people exist for a purpose. In order to continuously fulfill the org’s purpose in a changing external environment, its members need to make decisions regarding what to do and when to do it in order to counter unfavorable changes that are at odds with the org’s purpose. Since people need to know who will do what, when they’ll do it, and how they’ll coordinate with others to collectively counter external threats, decision-making meetings are held at all levels  to decide such issues of importance.

The figure below introduces the Decision-To-Meeting-Ratio (DETMER) metric. It also shows the divergence of this metric for two competing orgs who initially had the same DETMER value at an arbitrary time, T=0. Assuming (and it’s a bad assumption) that all decisions made at each meeting are effective, as the DETMER goes to zero nothing changes for the good within the org walls. People do the same thing everyday, even as the environmental conditions outside the walls relentlessly change. Voila, a bureaucracy led by a cadre of Bozeltines emerges. Bummer.