In service of the procedure
An employee entered an administrative department to process an internal transaction, but the system prompted him to upload the document electronically. He did so within minutes, only for a message to appear on his screen instructing him to print the same document, sign it by hand, scan it, and re-upload it.
He paused for a moment before the screen, not because the request was complex, but because it seemed as though half of the transaction lived in the present, while the other half remained stuck in the age of paper. The problem was not so much the procedure itself, as the question that no one seemed to ask anymore: Why are we still doing this?
Many solutions begin as temporary fixes. We devise them because an emergency situation is pressing on us, because technology is not yet complete, or because time does not allow for radical change.
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At the moment, they seem logical, even clever. But the danger begins when the temporary solution succeeds to the point that we stop searching for the root of the problem.
Here, the means becomes a habit, and the habit becomes a system. Then a new generation of employees or users arrives, learning the procedure exactly as it is, not as it began. Over time, the original rationale for the decision fades from memory, while the decision itself remains strongly entrenched through instructions, forms, and signatures. What was once an exception to address a specific circumstance becomes the standard by which all work is measured, until people lose their ability to distinguish between what is essential and what is merely inherited.
Perhaps this explains why some procedures appear more complex than the problem they were designed to solve. Humans tend to fix what is in front of them, rather than review what lies behind. When bypassing a flaw proves successful, the urgency to fix the flaw itself diminishes.
Thus, people begin to improve the way they coexist with the flaw, rather than asking whether it should exist at all.
The irony is that progress does not automatically erase the old. We may introduce a modern electronic system, only to load it with procedures designed for a different era. In doing so, we have not changed the system; we have merely transferred its old habits to a new screen. We may celebrate the speed of completion, while the same old idea continues to control the process from behind the screen.
Therefore, the most important administrative question is not whether the procedure works, but whether it still has a reason to exist. There is a difference between a system that has proven its utility and one that has survived simply because it has never been reviewed.
Perhaps the most dangerous problems are not those for which we lack solutions, but those we have lived with for too long under the protection of a temporary fix. When people forget why a procedure began, the institution begins to serve the procedure, rather than the procedure serving the institution.
A Kuwaiti writer
