Upcoming Webinar – 7 May 2025: Organisational Bureaucracy

Organisational bureaucracy and the board: balancing compliance and good business sense

7 May 2025 | 12:30-13:30 BST

Everybody hates bureaucracy. In an ideal world, a bureaucratic system is efficient, objective and delivers reliably good outcomes. In the real world, bureaucracy can stifle innovation and lead to lots of work whose only point seems to be to protect the bureaucrats from criticism when the outcomes are not good. 

The public sector is widely seen as the centre of excellence for mind-numbing bureaucracy. But much of the private sector has enthusiastically followed, despite the fact that clearly measurable outcomes such as profitability cannot be dismissed – at least, not for long – on the grounds that everyone followed the right process. 

Boards themselves are unbureaucratic things – in fact, a good board will have few, if any, of the characteristics that Max Weber identified as features of good bureaucracy.  So how should a board deal with a bureaucratic organisation? 

Join Charles Mayo and Charlotte Valeur in conversation with Jonathan Hayward as they consider:

• How does over-focus on compliance sabotage good decision-making? 

• What are the warning signs that box-ticking has overtaken business sense? 

• Is it possible to assess the costs of bureaucracy against its benefits, or do we have to rely on anecdote, habit and emotion? 

• What are the practical steps a board can take to recalibrate its relationship with bureaucracy?