6 ideas
In an organisation governed by rules, power accrues to whoever controls the areas of unpredictability that the rules cannot regulate. Because everything else is standardised, the ability to resolve or withhold resolution of the unforeseeable becomes the scarce resource others depend on.
In the state tobacco monopoly's plants, production workers and supervisors were bound by impersonal rules, but machine breakdowns were the one contingency nobody could schedule. Maintenance workers, who alone could fix the machines and guarded their know-how by avoiding written procedures, gained leverage over production workers and even formal supervisors, turning a technical role into a centre of informal power.
When dysfunctions arise, the organisation responds with more impersonal rules and more centralisation instead of adapting. Those rules create new gaps and new rigidities, which produce fresh dysfunctions that prompt still more rules, so the system cannot correct itself through its own feedback.
Read impersonal rules less as efficiency devices than as shields individuals use to avoid personal dependence on superiors and peers. Each actor prefers a rule that constrains everyone to a face-to-face relationship where someone else holds discretionary power, which explains why members defend rules that make the organisation worse.
Bureaucracies separate employees into hierarchical strata that barely communicate across levels but enforce strong conformity within each level. Decisions get made by people far from the information they need, while those holding the information lack authority, producing poor decisions and chronic resentment.
Because the vicious circle blocks gradual adjustment, bureaucratic organisations accumulate problems until a crisis forces sweeping, top-down reform. Change then happens in abrupt jolts decreed from the centre rather than through continuous local adaptation, and afterward the system resettles into the same rigidity.