1. The problem isn’t that we have administrators per se, but that little of what they do is dependent upon their own personal competency. Instead, everything is dependent upon system, structures and processes. We are ruled by “technique.” A thread.
2. What is this thing called “technique.” It is central to the work of French social thinker Jacques Ellul. It is a way of thinking about and interacting with the world rooted in what we might call “machine” thinking.
3. “Technique” is integral to science, industrialization, technology of course, and in a certain type of administrative thinking. One way to look at “technique” is that it is the source code for the whole of modern life. It is, in many ways, the root ideology.
4. “Technique” is in many ways the “ring of power” that binds so much of modern life together. It is in many ways the thing binds together such seemingly different ideologies such as liberalism, fascism, communism and capitalism.
5. “Technique” is at the heart of the administrative mindset. There has always been administrators. In the past, a large part of administering an organization or agency was dependent on the skill of the administrator. The way of doing things was tied to the person.
6. The key to a well run administration was finding the right people. You put them in place and cut them loose to do their thing. This is no longer the case, and this is the big shift in the “administrative mindset.” This is not just something confined to government.
7. “Technique” runs throughout business as well to. It is the same way of thinking in both. This is why, from a structural and ideological perspective there is no difference between the public and private sectors anymore. They are ideologically the same, both run on technique.
8. So what is “technique?” It is a way of thinking and understanding the world which wants to break down and rationalize human behavior into standardized repeatable processes. It is questing for the one best way to do everything.
9. Take teaching, for example. Focused on student outcomes every aspect of the teaching process is broken down, from lesson planning, to the way in which various subjects like math and reading are taught.
10. The idea is that if you can put in place the right techniques, that the process of educating students largely becomes teacher invariant. You learn and implement the right techniques across the school system, you will get consistent outcomes in student learning.
11. Whether it is teaching, manufacturing, quality control, customer service, aiding the poor or even church outreach, everything has a system, a rationalized “best practices” approach that can be applied in any situation regardless of the people.
12. Every process is abstracted and refined. They are refined again and again. People are then “trained” into the system. The way to improve any outcome is to improve the process, the system, the technique. This technical way of thinking is omnipresent at this point.
13. We are a technical society. So why does this make government bureaucracy so terrible? It makes all bureaucracy terrible, but government particularly so, because at least in businesses the need to be profitable does create some level of accountability.
14. The danger of technique is that it renders the person largely irrelevant. If the goal is to break down every process, rationalize it, and then refine it into the single best way to do something, the goal of people shifts from outcomes to the process.
15. The place where humans interact with the system is in the development and refinement of the process. Thus the focus is on the constant refinement of policy and procedures. How many times have you been in some corporate setting where the goal is “good process.”
16. The process whereby you arrive at a decision is more important than the actual quality of the decision. As long as you have organization wide stakeholder buy in and participation it was a success. If the decision is crap, you go back to working on refining the process.
17. In the old day you may have had a disagreeable tyrant for a boss but the organization ran well because he made great decisions and imposed his way of doing things on everything. When he went, his way went with him. This could lead to a lot of variance in quality.
18. A good example is in the area of “content moderation.” A technique based approach wants to develop the single best set of policies to govern content rules so as to take “bias” out of the system and produce consistent, predictable, fair results all the time.
19. The old way is that content moderation would largely be up to then wisdom and discretion of the person. As long as you have good people it works great. This is lure of the technical approach. The desire to take that variance out of system.
20. “Technique” strives to remove that variance. In teaching. In assembly lines. In churches. In government. The price of that is the person is taken out of the process. It’s all about policy, systems, best practices and the like. Outcomes stop mattering.
21. That is the strange thing. Wasn’t consistent high quality outcomes the point? Yes. But the main focus is no longer on the outcome per se, but on the refinement of process. The real skill work is no longer in the outcomes, it’s in refining the processes.
22. This is why I have been saying that the results of the Covid regime were less important the chance to implement crisis management processes so as to have a chance to see them at work, examine them and refine them. Covid protocols were a kind of beta testing process.
23. This is why so much government administration is so terrible. No one is responsible for outcomes. The people on the front lines, even credentialed professionals, are just “following protocols.” The real work is in refining the protocols.
24. So much of government is focused not on actual results but on the development and refinement of processes and policies. Government is about the process of governing. Coming up with the single best process for everything.
25. This is real reason Elon Musk is so disruptive. He is the tyrannical boss focused on results. He is still a tech guy devoted to technique, but in some ways he is an old school glitch in the system. To make the system work he is willing to break it.
26. Some pieces of mine. On the conjunction of liberalism and technique: apokekrummenain.substack.com
27. On why the administrative state as currently constituted, that is, run on technique, cannot be reformed or even bent for conservative ends: apokekrummenain.substack.com
28. Can we as human beings gain mastery over technique? Can we regain human agency? apokekrummenain.substack.com
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