Q&A: Mark Schwartz x Shaaron Alvares

Shaaron Alvares: My name is Shaaron Alvares. I work as an agile and DevOps transformation coach, and I presented last year and this year at the DevOps Enterprise Summit. And as you may know, we are approaching the DevOps Enterprise Summit in October, on October 10 to 13 to 15. And so we will host a weekly session of roughly 30 minutes with experts, speakers, and authors to discuss their talk and their experience leading DevOps and agile transformations in their organizations. So today I have Mark Schwartz. I don't think we need to introduce Mark, but for those who haven't read his books, Mark was CIO at the USCIS for seven years, from 2010 to 2017. And under his influence, the immigration services became a model for the US government for DevOps, cloud architecture, microservices, and agility. And since 2017, Mark works as an enterprise strategist at Amazon AWS, where he advises CIOs of the largest global organizations on how to address scaling, organizational, and technology challenges. So Mark published several books and must-read books. One of the latest that came out is "War and Peace in IT," and in fact, I have it in my bag. And he's publishing a new book that's coming out on October 10, "The Delicate Art of Bureaucracy." And he will also be speaking at the DevOps Enterprise Summit conference coming up in October. And so if you want to hear Mark speak, you should definitely register. So thank you, Mark, for being here today and doing this Q&A and discussion with me today. Would you like to introduce yourself, add anything?

Mark Schwartz: Yeah. Well, thank you for having me. This is a pleasure. And I think we're going to have some fun because bureaucracy is really a fun topic, and people don't realize that.

Shaaron Alvares: It is, yeah. It is absolutely. I read the book and, like I mentioned, I couldn't put it down, actually. I finished it in three days. And it's an amazing book. It's very entertaining and I never thought I would enjoy actually reading a book about bureaucracy, but it's really just fantastic. It's very insightful, and it's also very pragmatic. So it's full of advice for anybody in an organization that face bureaucracy. And it's also very interesting because you help people understand what bureaucracy is, right? We talk about it, but we don't always know what we mean by bureaucracy, and everybody has a different definition of bureaucracy. So the book is divided, I want to cover the book really quickly before we jump into questions. The book is divided into three main parts. So part one, digital transformation and bureaucracy is dedicated to defining, clarifying, and understanding the meaning of bureaucracy. And part two, building a better bureaucracy. In part two, you propose a new model for a better bureaucracy with a lot of pragmatic tips, very insightful. And in part three, part three is the playbook, and it contains four plays to tackle bureaucracy. So the way of the monkey, the way of the razor, and the way of the sumo, and the way of the black belt bureaucracy if you work for an organization plagued with a tenacious bureaucracy. So, what is bureaucracy, Mark? How do you define it?

Mark Schwartz: Yeah. Well, there's sort of a standard definition of bureaucracy that comes from the German sociologist Max Weber, who was writing at the beginning of the 20th century. And what it comes down to in my way of interpreting Weber is it's an organization or a way of using authority that's based on rigid rules and rigid lines of authority. That's not exactly how he says it. He gives a little more detail on it. But basically, a bureaucracy is a system where you have a division of labor, very precisely divided. You have a management hierarchy, a clear hierarchy. And you have a set of rules that are applied impartially. And the thing is, because the rules are applied impartially, the bureaucracy, a typical bureaucracy can seem very impersonal and distant and even inhuman. The rules are the rules, and you got to follow them. So those are the characteristics of a bureaucracy, at least in Weber's view, and that's the view that's usually used in any writings about sociology or management theory. And that's my starting point.

Shaaron Alvares: Yeah, that's really interesting. And could you tell us more about who the book's audience is? Who's the intended audience?

Mark Schwartz: Well, I think people who read romance novels would be interested. No, I'm only kidding. Really, the audience is anybody who experiences bureaucracy in their work settings, which means everybody, I think. But specifically, I use as an example digital transformation, since that's usually who I'm writing for, is people who are trying to do some sort of digital transformation. And very often they face impediments coming from bureaucracy, and they need to deal with them, cope with them, get around them, whatever it is. So I use examples drawn from that situation throughout the book, but I think the principles are pretty widely applicable to anybody who is facing a bureaucracy and needs to figure out how to deal with it, or anybody who needs to act like a bureaucrat, and I argue that sometimes people do, to tell them how to do it well so that it doesn't drive other people crazy.

Shaaron Alvares: Right. Yeah. Yeah, I very much agree with you. I think we all, in any roles we are, we all face bureaucracy, and it's part of, especially when you work for really old organizations. 15, 20, 30 years old organizations, because they built their organization, they build their structure on top of each others. So we accumulate a lot of legacy systems, legacy structure, legacy organization, and legacy channels of communications. And these are very difficult to, not remove, but address. And, so it's really difficult to drive a more leaner organization. So, and for every role, not just on the ground or at the executive level. So, can we delegate tackling bureaucracy? And, how can leaders and executive leverage the book and the playbooks, to transform bureaucracy into something valuable, into a valuable capability?

Mark Schwartz: Yeah. It's kind of funny that the book raises that question, right? People don't think about bureaucracy as being a valuable capability. But it is, and maybe we'll talk a little bit about why that is. But, I think the bureaucracies that we encounter every day are bureaucracies that suffer from certain problems. In other words, bureaucracy itself isn't the problem, it's the way we've set up bureaucracies. And so typically we find that a bureaucracy, number one, it's wasteful or bloated. Number two, it petrifies. It never changes. Right? And, number three, it's coercive. The idea of the bureaucracy is to tell people what to do or force them to do the right things. Really, those three things, let's see if I can remember them now that I've said them. Petrifying, wasteful, and coercive. Well, those three characteristics of bureaucracy are not essential to it. And in fact, I talk about how you can make a bureaucracy the opposite of those things. So, enabling instead of coercive, lean instead of bloated, and learning instead of petrified. And you can actually set up a learning cycle within a bureaucracy to constantly improve the rules. You can set up your bureaucracy so that it's not telling people no and criticizing them, but it's actually enabling them to do a better job. And you can set up a bureaucracy without a lot of the waste that we typically have in bureaucracies. And I think that's the job of management to do. But the book is really about how everybody else can, who's suffering from the bureaucracy, how they might take action to improve the bureaucracy as well.

Shaaron Alvares: Yeah. So it's very interesting. When we develop a transformation roadmap, we have a backlog of transformation items and capabilities we want to tackle, for example, product management. So, and we lead a continuous improvement to address all of these aspects as we want to transform. And so what you said just made me think we should almost add bureaucracy in our transformation backlog and work on it, tackle it, and continuously improve to make it better. And it should be part of a transformation. Because we are trying to become lean. We're not just trying to deliver... Well, we're trying to deliver value to our customers and faster, but to do that, we can't just address the technology and the product, we also have to address the entire organization structure, line of communication, hierarchy and so on. So-

Mark Schwartz: Yes

Shaaron Alvares: ... yeah, we-

Mark Schwartz: I totally agree with that. Yeah.

Shaaron Alvares: So in part one of the book, and you touch on that actually, the characteristic. So you shared some positive characteristic of bureaucracy, and you share also some negative, impeding characteristics of a bureaucracy. And you just touch on three of them, actually. So you actually identified 10 of them. They're really fantastic. I love reading that part of the book. So I want to highlight two of them. It stifles innovation, and it's risky by being risk-averse. I like those two, and they're actually related, I think. Could you elaborate on this?

Mark Schwartz: Sure. So, what I say later on in the book is that, even though people think it stifles innovation, actually there's some evidence that the opposite is true. But, apparently it does, right? Because you want to try something new, but the rules are set up for the old way of doing things. That's usually the characteristic of bureaucracy, is it encodes the way of doing things that you're doing now. And turns that way of doing things into rules that you have to follow. So if you're trying to do something new and innovative, it's almost always going to conflict with those rules, that really describe how you did things before. It turns out that actually, if you examine what is necessary to stimulate innovation in an organization, some of those characteristics, and I'm quoting from management theorist Paul Adler, some of those characteristics actually are characteristics that are consistent with bureaucracy. So that's why I say sometimes it doesn't really stifle innovation. And then, what was the other one that you mentioned? So it's risky by- Risky ... being risk-averse. Yeah. So, what often happens is, because the organization is risk-averse, every time something goes wrong, it makes up a new rule to make sure that thing doesn't go wrong again. And the result is that you wind up with a lot of rules and a lot of bureaucracy, a heavyweight bureaucracy. But the thing is, in a time of fast change, the digital world, these heavyweight bureaucratic rules often slow you down, and moving slowly in a time of fast change is very risky. So in that sense, it's risky. Also, people often don't realize how much cost is being added to what they're doing because of bureaucratic requirements. And the more expensive your initiative is, the more risky it is. So for example, I love to give the example from my government time of this MD102 policy, which essentially said, for releasing any IT system, we had to write 87 documents and go through 13 gate reviews and so on. The intention, of course, is to reduce risk. They wanted to have lots of gatekeeping and get everything documented. So the goal is reduced risk. But if you actually add up the cost of producing those 87 documents and going through the 13 gate reviews, it increases the cost of the initiative by a lot, which of course just makes it a riskier initiative. So that's what I meant when I said, being risk-averse in this case makes things more risky.

Shaaron Alvares: Right. Yeah. Thank you very much. You mentioned that bureaucracy is necessary in various areas, so-- And I like that it's not all bad, right? It's not a bad word, and it's not all negative. And one of them, the positive areas, is in the organization's brand. So I want to read a quote from the book. "One of the most compelling uses of bureaucracy in today's economy is to support a company's branding." So how can we better our democracy to support our brand and culture?

Mark Schwartz: Yeah. Let me start by telling you another reason why bureaucracy is important, and then I'll come back to branding in a second.

Shaaron Alvares: Sure.

Mark Schwartz: Because I want to make this point. So organizations increasingly have compliance frameworks that they need to deal with. So for example, GDPR or HIPAA or Sarbanes-Oxley or whatever. Those compliance frameworks require that the company have people who are accountable and signing off on certain things. It requires that processes be auditable and followed, and that there be controls to make sure processes are followed. In other words, they require bureaucracy. Those are exactly the characteristics of bureaucracy. So I think it would be hard to actually comply with those things without having some element of bureaucracy in your organization. Now, here, when I say bureaucracy, I mean the way I defined it before. I don't mean that it has to be annoying and drive you crazy. It just needs to have rigid rules and rigid authorities. So when it comes to branding, this is another area where bureaucracy is pretty much essential in my mind. To support a brand, you need consistency in how the brand is presented. And so, for example, to take my company, for example, Amazon, we always write using a certain font or a selection of a couple of fonts and always certain colors. And we have a logo, and the logo has to be presented the same way every time. And it needs to integrate with the text in certain ways. All of those things provide the consistency that lets customers associate our brand with a set of attributes that we want them to associate with it. If you think about other companies, Coca-Cola and their famous logo, the sort of scripted version of their name, or McDonald's with their golden arches. You can't have one McDonald's location that uses smaller arches or arches in a different color. It wouldn't be McDonald's. So in order to keep that consistency, you have to have rules around how the brand will be expressed, and sometimes you have to have people authorized to make decisions, like, "Is it okay if I use this color for the company's name or something?" Somebody has to be authorized to make those decisions. That's bureaucracy again. Right. Yeah. And brands can be extremely valuable, worth many tens of billions of dollars, and they can't have that value unless you have that consistency that bureaucracy helps provide.

Shaaron Alvares: Right. So with what you just said and what you said before, it made me think that we talk about minimum viable processes. It's almost like we need to understand what could be our minimum viable bureaucracy, right? What is it that's valuable and that we need? And what can work as a safeguard and what is not valuable and what can be considered as a waste? So I think we'll get back to that. I have a question on that. So the playbook in part three, you actually offer a very pragmatic playbook, and it's broken down in four plays, very insightful, pragmatic, like I mentioned, and applicable by anyone in any organization. So the four plays are The Way of the Monkey, The Way of the Razor, and The Way of the Sumo Wrestler, and then the fourth is very interesting. It's The Way of the Black Belt Bureaucracy, which applies to the most tenacious bureaucracies. So how do you recommend we use these plays? Do we need to apply them based on the level of maturity or the level of bureaucracy we have in our organizations, or they describe different patterns, practices, or can we mix and match them?

Mark Schwartz: My intention in writing the book, and I think everybody should use it, however is best for them, but I found that you run into different bureaucratic impediments at different stages in what you're doing and different organizations, it's a different set of impediments. So this is meant to be a playbook or a toolkit of ideas for overcoming the specific kinds of bureaucracy you find and the specific impediments. So, I mean it that way. It's not a question of maturity. It's more a question of what issue are you facing and what might you try to overcome that issue. The first three are ways of busting the bureaucracy or getting around it or fixing it. The fourth one, The Black Belt Bureaucrat, is really meant for a leader who has to impose bureaucracy, maybe because of those compliance frameworks or because of branding or whatever it is. And, as I said, bureaucracies can be bad, or they can be good. And, so that is my playbook for those leaders who are establishing a bureaucracy, how they can do so without driving everybody crazy. But the first three, each of those three characters, let's say, is broken down into about 10 plays, specific things that you might do when you're in the role of that character, let's say. So, The Monkey is my favorite, of course. The Monkey is mischievous and a big disruptor. So, the main role of The Monkey is to provoke the enterprise and learn about it that way and see what can be changed or what the obstacles will be to change. So, The Monkey sort of provokes and sees, and learns and re-strategizes based on what he learns, or she learns. The Razor is the character that trims away the fat. It's the character who is looking to make the bureaucracy lean, is finding different sources of waste and is getting rid of them. So they're about 10 plays that I associate with that. And then, The Sumo Wrestler, this was maybe one of my biggest learnings when I was in the bureaucracy. The Sumo Wrestler uses the strength of the bureaucracy against itself, and it's actually very possible to do. We fought bureaucracy with bureaucracy and improved it a lot that way, which is kind of what sumo wrestlers do. If you ever watch a sumo match, you see you got these two big heavy guys, and they crash into each other, and then they push against each other. And, if your opponent weakens or lets up, then you push harder, and you push them over. If your opponent is pushing too hard, though, you just let go, and then they go flying because you're not pushing anymore. So, sumo is all about using these opposing forces and taking advantage of what your opponent is doing to win the match. So, that's the three general characters, but then I break each of those into about 10 ways you could use that character.

Shaaron Alvares: Right. For The Way of the Monkey, I really like provoke and observe, advertise the cost of delay, which is a really good one, and conduct pilots. Yeah. So, no, really great ways and practices.

Mark Schwartz: Yeah.

Shaaron Alvares: So you wrote, I'm quoting the book, "One reason why bureaucracy-busting initiatives have little chance of success is that they're centrally managed, and centralization tends to require more bureaucracy." So which means even when we try to tackle bureaucracy, and we generally do it in a centralized manner, right? And that's why I was asking you who would be the audience of this book, who should use the book? And, again, it's true. I don't think it should be only the executives. It has to be across the organization, right? Because if it's centralized, like you mentioned here, we risk to add bureaucracy, additional processes, additional command and control practices. So how can we use the plays to develop a decentralized approach to making a bureaucracy more efficient?

Mark Schwartz: Yeah. I come across this a lot in my role at AWS when I meet with the executives of large enterprises, and especially IT organizations often say that they're going to get rid of waste by centralizing things. It's quite common. Or a lot of the time, there's just the dynamic between a central shared services organization and independent business units or something like that. So centralization versus decentralization is a pretty active issue for a lot of organizations. But I also had in mind the new CEO who comes to a company and says, "I'm going to get rid of all the bureaucracy. That's my priority." And they make a bunch of rules to try to get rid of bureaucracy, and, of course, when you're making rules to get rid of bureaucracy, you're making rules. You're just changing the face of the bureaucracy. It also happens with governments. We've had a number of initiatives in the United States where a new president comes in and says they're going to make everything lean, they're going to get rid of waste in the government. And then they establish policies that are supposed to get rid of waste. So, I see it a lot. What I think is, first of all, the problem with that is when you centralize a function, and I'm not saying you never should, I'm going to come back to that in a second, but when you centralize something like enterprise architecture standards and you're going to set those centrally, and then all of the independent teams are going to have to conform to those standards. Well, that's a beautiful example of bureaucracy, right? The rules are you use this enterprise architecture, and the enterprise architects are the ones who make those decisions, so they have very defined accountabilities. And again, I'm not saying it's bad. What I'm saying is that if you're going to centralize, you can do it in a way that actually empowers the teams. Like I said, there's good bureaucracy and bad bureaucracy. And good bureaucracy really has these three characteristics that I talked about. It's lean, it's enabling, and it's learning. And if you take this example, let's say, of a centralized enterprise architecture function, well, how can it be lean? It can be lean by not doing gatekeeping at the end or late in a process and saying, "Oh, no, you didn't follow the architectural standards." Instead, it can be involved early in the process and help guide and help software developers engineer their systems. And also referring back to my days in DHS, we had to file all these papers for our enterprise architecture, describing it and describing why it fits with the standards and all that. Well, get rid of that. That's how you make it lean. How do you make it enabling? Well, you set up an architecture that's actually going to speed up the teams in doing their work and be a tool that they can use and maybe have options as well, but a tool that works really well and that you know does. And then how can you be learning? Well, you can make sure that your architectural standards change and change as often as necessary, and that there is an easy way to change them when better ways of setting up the architecture are available. So all I'm saying is that when you centralize, you necessarily are creating bureaucracy, but you can do it in a way that can make a lot of sense, actually. You just have to decide whether it's worth centralizing and having the bureaucracy, and then you have to figure out how to make it good bureaucracy.

Shaaron Alvares: Right. Yeah. Thank you very much. And so we talked mostly about internal processes and bureaucracy, but we also deal with, and I think you talk a little bit about that in your book, about what we call customer-facing bureaucracy, which impacts customer services, customer relationship, and eventually the business. So how can organizations reduce their customer-facing bureaucracy as well?

Mark Schwartz: We all hate it when we call a company, and we get their IVR system, and you get a bunch of robot people. Maybe it's automated or maybe it's people, but they're acting like robots and being very bureaucratic, right? Right. I think in many cases, that happens because they're replicating the bureaucracy inside their organization. So, for example, they transfer you from one person to another because their org chart separates between the two roles. So the internal bureaucracy is affecting the way they treat customers. And I think there are a lot of examples of that, where the internal bureaucracy sort of bleeds over into the customer experience. It can be improved, obviously, by improving the internal bureaucracy. So maybe you can empower that representative on the phone to do the functions of multiple departments. You can have more autonomy and enablement. But also, some studies have found that a certain amount of bureaucracy can actually lead to better customer service, and the mechanism there seems to be that bureaucracy can give the representative that you're talking to on the phone, it can give them as well-established, well-routined solutions to problems that they can then just execute as written because it's a known solution. And so in a way, they can have sort of a tool bag of ways of solving your problems, each of which is a bureaucratic solution, but known to be effective, and then they can choose the appropriate tools, for example. So it's a surprising conclusion.

Shaaron Alvares: Yeah. But it's also really important to tackle as well, right? It's not just internal, it's also the impact of our internal bureaucracy, the impact that it has on customer-facing, relationship, communication, and so on. It's really important. It could almost incentivize organization to actually address their internal bureaucracy.

Mark Schwartz: Yes.

Shaaron Alvares: So as more and more... You covered a little bit of that actually, but as more and more organizations are adopting development platform, it's really becoming, not mainstream yet, but and common tools and value stream management platforms, do you think that this change in technology investments and adoption will create more common processes and standards and more bureaucracy or the opposite?

Mark Schwartz: I think in many ways more effective bureaucracy. So I often talk about DevOps as a kind of bureaucracy, and in fact DevOps to me is an excellent bureaucracy. It has all the characteristics of good bureaucracy, and it has those characteristics because it's highly automated. The three characteristics that I named for good bureaucracy, all of those are facilitated by automating things. So, well, I could give lots of examples of how it works, but essentially what you're doing is you're taking a rule that in the past would've been applied by a human being in a coercive way. You got to do this, you got to do that, and instead making an automated process that already implements those rules. And so there's no need for coercion. It's something that helps everybody do their jobs better. So, for example, to get a little bit technical for a second, in the cloud it's really important for anyone who spins up a virtual machine or an instance, that they tag it with accounting categories and things like that for transparency. So you could have a rule that says every new resource you spin up has to have a tag. And in the old way of doing bureaucracy, you might have somebody who checks to make sure every resource has a tag, and if it doesn't, then they call the person who spun up the resource and complain and whine and tell their manager or whatever. That's kind of the old way of doing bureaucracy. But instead, what we can do, for example, is automate the process of spinning up resources and automate policies that say if somebody tries to spin up a resource without a tag, just don't let them do it. Well, that enforces the rule, and it does it in a way that gives immediate feedback to the person, and it takes out this emotional, coercive aspect to it. But you can do even better. You can automate the process of standing up the resource in a way that just inserts the right tag automatically. And if you do that, then nobody has to worry about the bureaucracy. Nobody has to worry about whether they're compliant, in other words. They are compliant. And it is lean because they don't have to do any work. It's enabling because it's doing something that they otherwise would've had to do themselves. So it's the ideal sort of bureaucracy in my way of looking at it. And it comes with doing things like DevOps. It's one of the learnings, in fact, of the last 10 years of DevOps.

Shaaron Alvares: Yeah. So, I'm hearing we can agilize, we can make our bureaucracy lean and agile, in fact. And we should tackle our bureaucracy to make it more lean and agile. So in "The Black Belt Bureaucracy" play, you mentioned the minimum viable bureaucracy, and so how do you recommend us to use the playbook to assess our bureaucracy to understand what's wasteful and what's valuable?

Mark Schwartz: You said it before, really. Part of transformation is looking at bureaucracy. You don't have to, if you're okay with long lead times and wasted money. But if you want to save, if you want to reduce your costs, well, one area where you probably have a lot of costs is bureaucratic waste. And if you have to cut your budget by a dollar, should you take it from productive work or should you take it from bureaucratic waste? I suggest you take it from bureaucratic waste, or at least you look carefully at your bureaucracy and see whether there are opportunities for removing waste. Because if you do so, it's going to make you faster and it's going to reduce your costs. So I guarantee that in your organization you have bureaucracy. I explained some of the reason for it before, but your bureaucracy might be good bureaucracy, might be bad bureaucracy. It's probably somewhere in between or maybe all the way on the bad side, and there are plenty of opportunities for improving it by making it leaner and reducing your costs.

Shaaron Alvares: Right. Yeah. We just need to want to tackle it, recognize it, identify it.

Mark Schwartz: Nobody wants to, right?

Shaaron Alvares: Right.

Mark Schwartz: That's why I wrote the book.

Shaaron Alvares: Right.

Mark Schwartz: To make them enjoy tackling bureaucracy.

Shaaron Alvares: Right. And it works. It's a very enjoyable book to read. Well, thank you very much, Mark. I really enjoyed this conversation with you, and I highly recommend anyone to buy the book and read it. Like I mentioned, it's very entertaining. It's really funny. It has a lot of great practice, and it's very eye-opening actually because we think we know bureaucracy. It's generally not a positive word, but you explained that, like you mentioned, that it's actually sometimes needed and we just need to understand how we can make it better, leaner, and more agile. So the book is coming out on October 10th, and you'll be speaking about it at the DevOps Enterprise Summit between October 13 and 15. So I highly encourage any one of you to register. You can register to the event. It's a online event. So thank you very much, Mark.

Mark Schwartz: Thank you.

Shaaron Alvares: Thank you.

Mark Schwartz: My pleasure.

Shaaron Alvares: Yeah, thanks. Bye-bye.

Mark Schwartz: Bye-bye.