# When trusted hierarchies metastasize they become inefficient bureaucracy or dictatorship [[All institutions can metastasize]] and trusted hierarchies have two failure modes: inefficient bureaucracy or dictatorship. Trusted hierarchies become inefficient bureaucracy when the trust degrades between people in the hierarchy. Instead of being empowered to act through trusted delegation people have two options. They must either follow the letter of some set of rules or pass requests all the way up the tree have them approved and then passed all the way back down which is wildly inefficient. Out of good faith efforts to avoid this inefficient message-passing, people add more and more rules to the ruleset that end up adding more inefficiency because now you need to check any action against all of the rules or risk getting in trouble for some rule you missed. Sometimes the rules even come into conflict. Trusted hierarchies become dictatorships when people trust (or at least listen to) the people above them but do not listen to the people below them. When trust runs only one way, it destroys any feedback loops to those higher in the hierarchy. You’ll notice that the failure mode in dictatorships is that the dictator gets completely out of touch with what’s happening on the ground and makes disastrous decisions: Mao’s Great Leap Forward, Hitler’s decision to open a second front in WWII, Edwin Land’s decision to push his vision of instant video cameras despite video-based cameras taking over the market. ### Related * [[Formal process lets people outside the organization trust in the process instead of the people]] * [[Bureaucracies remove the need for trust]] <!-- #evergreen --> [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/When+trusted+hierarchies+metastasize+they+become+inefficient+bureaucracy+or+dictatorship) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/When+trusted+hierarchies+metastasize+they+become+inefficient+bureaucracy+or+dictatorship)