Bureaucratic vs Humanistic Workplaces

There's a natural dichotomy between conservative, control-focused organisations and progressive, outcome-focused organisations.

Early last century, Weber argued that bureaucracies are the most effective way of structuring labour. Toyota turned this around, showing that self-motivated employees are more effective.

There's a currently popular view that bureaucracy is more suited to process work, where autonomy seems less necessary and outcomes can be strictly measured, whereas adhocracy is more suited to knowledge work where high autonomy is required and outcomes are more difficult to quantify.

However, this ignores the learnings from Toyota where many jobs are process-oriented and measurable. It turns out that bureaucracy is almost never a superior option. It's a sub-optimal solution you fall back on when more effective approaches have failed.

The following list is a work in progress and the categories are somewhat arbitrary, but feedback is welcome.