The bureaucracy: Think again
What if we paused and stopped criticizing and looked again? At its root, bureaucracy is simply an attempt to bring order, fairness, and consistency to complex society. It’s meant to ensure accountability, equality, and clarity in how decisions are made. The problem isn’t bureaucracy itself — it’s when the system forgets its purpose and begins to serve itself rather than the people within it.
So the challenge is not to dismantle all forms of bureaucracy, but to reimagine it. To ask: How might bureaucracy become more human? More adaptive? More enabling rather than obstructive?
Remember first who these public servants are and there over 500 million across the world. They are teachers, nurses, police officers, social workers, firefighters, waste disposers, urban planners, traffic engineers, environmental standards officials as well as policy analysts. Can you imagine society working without them. Most civil servants genuinely try to serve the public good and the administrative systems that keep complex societies functioning. They execute the boring but essential work of making sure regulations are followed and public services are delivered. It's one of those words that carries both the weight of legitimate criticism and unfair stereotype. So let’s think afresh.
What does good bureaucracy look like?
There are many examples from across the world that we highlight at the Creative Bureaucracy Festival in Berlin https://creativebureaucracy.org/ They exhibit the good qualities we would wish a more ideal bureaucracy to show. Such an institution is not flashy. It doesn’t make headlines. it works — quietly, fairly, and with dignity. It meets people where they are and it is accessible by design. The offices are open at times that suit working people with intuitive digital systems with options for those without internet access. Forms are expressed in clear ordinary language and available in multiple languages. This is not a culture that says: “Have they filled the form out properly?” Instead you feel: “Have we made it possible for you to do so?”
This bureaucracy centres on caring and not being suspicious. Its systems are not designed to catch you out or to police you. It has faith in you and sees you as a person to be trusted – as a citizen and not as someone trying to cheat or to evade the law. Trust is the foundation of a public life that works for all.
This means it is transparent and accountable. Decisions are explained in plain language and they can be challenged as can the processes behind them so you can appeals and be treated fairly. This system tells you where your application is and which steps are still to be completed and who is responsible so that you can contact them. In other words there is no black box where decisions go to disappear.
The system is not inflexible and responds to changing circumstances. It adapts, such as when the pandemic hit in 2020 and a mass of decisions were made quickly, the judgement of civil servants was trusted and they could short cut procedures that were not deemed necessary. Red tape disappeared. And there was innovation too, as outdated policies were challenged and consultation was streamlined. Think of all the sidewalks that across the world suddenly became public meeting places. What was once forbidden was now allowed. A crisis does not make the good bureaucracy freeze, instead it flexes.
This good bureaucracy understands that getting communities to help shape the rules and outcomes engenders commitment, loyalty and pride in their institutions. This means letting citizens participate. They then feel they have ownership as they are sharing power and so take responsibility for the results. Redistributing power does not have to mean decisions take longer.
By collaborating with those it serves, it “builds with” and not simply for. For instance, in urban planning, health care, or social services those people most affected are at the centre of the process and not on the edge. At the same they value frontline staff and their knowledge especially as those social workers, housing officers or community organisers doing the work on the ground are empowered to make decisions. They are not buried in checklists and chain-of-command loops.
A good system listens to its own workers and treats the ability to act on discretion not as a threat,
but as a skill.
In essence a good bureaucracy is slow enough to be careful, but fast enough to matter. It moves at the speed of need and not of process. It is rooted in fairness, structured by clarity, and shaped by and with those it serves. There are no walls, you do not experience a maze instead you feel there is a bridge between people and possibility. A good bureaucracy is not afraid to be human and doesn’t just enforce rules as it remembers why the rules were made in the first place. It resists the drift toward cold abstraction and stays rooted in the lives it touches.