Self-Perpetuating Problems

Definition

Asking "WHERE DOES THIS PROBLEM COME FROM?" usually turns up a person, a process, or a motivation you can act on — far better than blaming vague "Nature" or "human nature," which the book calls "the world's number one excuse for inactivity." But some problems trace back to nothing external at all: "the ultimate source of the problem may be nowhere at all... IN THE VALLEY OF THE PROBLEM SOLVERS, THE PROBLEM CREATOR IS KING, OR PRESIDENT, OR DEAN." A memo-generating bureaucracy, a standing army after the war ends, or a disarmament conference can become an institution that perpetuates its own reason for existing, because the people who staff it have no incentive to see it disappear.

In the Book

Janet Jaworski, stalled by a Polish visa clerk demanding an eighth notarized copy, resists blaming impersonal "bureaucracy" and instead traces the clerk's behavior to a plausible source — selection processes (the book invokes the Peter and Paul Principles) that promote functionaries chosen precisely for being intractable enough to shield superiors from clients — and by treating him as a person (learning his name, Mr. Matczyszyn, instead of "Mr. Grayface") she resolves the visa problem directly. A "Utilization of Commas in Weekly Punctuation Reports" memo, by contrast, illustrates a problem that comes from itself: bureaucratic activity, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," is self-perpetuating because its originators — safely separated in offices "on the top floor of the tallest building" — profit from generating it. The chapter's sharpest example is the International Disarmament Conference: the very people whose careers, meals, and patisserie visits depend on the arms race persisting have every reason not to solve it, and problem-solving institutions whose original problem vanishes (the March of Dimes after polio, standing armies after a war) routinely go find another problem rather than disband.

Why It Matters

An institution, procedure, or role that was created to solve a problem can quietly become dependent on that problem's continued existence, at which point no amount of well-intentioned effort from within it will resolve the problem — the incentive runs the other way. Asking who benefits from a problem's persistence, and whether the answer includes the very people or offices tasked with fixing it, exposes a class of problems that ordinary troubleshooting can't touch because the trouble is the point.