Process limits power

Sometimes, especially when dealing with government bureaucracy, it feels like all of the rules, forms and arbitrary steps are designed to make your life difficult. In fact, you could be forgiven for thinking that process is being used as a way to exercise power, as a kind of weapon or mechanism of control. While it's true that bureaucracy often makes you feel powerless, I would argue the opposite: that processes and rules are designed to restrict powerful entities.

The thing is that being powerful normally means less restrictions on what you can do. In fact, I would define power as being the extent to which you can get what you want. Someone who is powerful can exert control on their environment, and someone who is supremely powerful can do so without restriction. However, most people don't like the idea of unchecked power – or, at least, of other people having unchecked power. So we build processes and rules to limit the power of government, who in turn build processes and rules to limit powerful corporations and individuals.

Within an organisation you will often find internal bureaucracy for much the same reason: that organisation delegates a certain degree of its power and resources to employees, and needs to limit their ability to abuse that power. A manager is allowed to spend the company's money, but has to go through a purchasing process to do so. A loan officer at a bank is empowered to issue loans, but has to follow a strict process to evaluate those loans. That processes doesn't just protect the company from that employee abusing their power, it also protects the employee: if something goes wrong, but they followed the process, they won't be fired. (At least, in a country where the company's power to fire is limited by process).

And similarly with the government and its love of forms. Those forms aren't to restrict your power when you're doing your taxes or applying for a passport – what power? Rather, they are to protect you from the government's power. If you fill out the forms correctly and according to the process that the government has set out, then the government is required to give you your passport or charge you the correct amount of tax. If that process didn't exist, there wouldn't be any forms, but maybe the government would decide to not give you a passport because they don't feel like it today.

That's not to say that all process is good and necessary. In fact, I think the main reason we see process as disempowering is the way that it tends to be used as a kind of cargo cult signal of power. Power is often limited by process, so you invent processes in order to feel powerful. Or worse, you see powerful people institute process when they delegate power, so you create unnecessary processes to feel powerful. Bad managers are infamous for implementing arbitrary reporting or process requirements on employees just because it's what they think managers do.

There's an even more pernicious kind of process abuse that genuinely does limit power as designed, but does it to people or groups who should have power. In that sense it is the kind of weaponisation or control theory of processes I argued against, but it's not things like complicated forms to get your driver's license. It's processes like voter registration that add more process, and thus more limits to the voting power of people over their government. In a democracy, the flow of power should be from people to government via voting, so anything that limits that power is inherently concerning.

You might argue that there are processes that are used to exercise power, like America's civil forfeiture program. That program allows police officers to sieze property on a very flimsy burden of proof and requires a protracted and complicated legal process to resolve. However, my argument is that these situations are just examples of not enough process. To see why, imagine that asset seizure did not have any restrictions, even the current flimsy ones: the police would take even more than they do now! They are the ones with power, and process is what limits that power.

I think this can be a particularly useful way to analyse both process and power. Of power: what processes are in place to limit it? And of process: what power does it limit? And if it doesn't limit anything, do you need it?