Even Gods can fall to bureaucracy.
“Poseidon sat at his desk, doing figures. The administration of all the waters gave him endless work.”
In Franz Kafka’s short story, Poseidon is overwhelmed by paperwork. The Olympian does’t have time to wield divine power over the seas, storms, and earthquakes; he is too busy with bureaucracy. He is stuck in “the depths of the world-ocean, doing figures uninterruptedly.”
“What irritated him most — and it was this that was chiefly responsible for his dissatisfaction with his job — was to hear of the conceptions formed about him: how he was always riding about through the tides with his trident.”
This is Poseidon’s Paradox: divine potential is wasted in endless administration, while public resources are outsourced.
This happens most often in public institutions, where there is little flexibility to hire the right talent for fill in for the right job, and little budget is allocated to up-skill. Jennifer Pahlka, author of
, highlights: “When systems or organizations don’t work the way you think they should, it is generally not because the people in them are stupid or evil. It is because they are operating according to structures and incentives that aren’t obvious from the outside.”The way bureaucracy dissipates potential doesn’t have to be egregious. In fact, it is often subtle and intractable. It is death by a thousand papercuts: small, repeated, seemingly bearable pains that compound, causing an exponential loss of time, motivation, and skills. Recently, I have seen two instances of these banal evils recurring.
1. Small Papercuts Add Up to Fatal Bleeds in Procurement
The irony of public processes is that they present themselves as monoliths, but they are nests of different species of bureaucracy. This is most evident in public tenders — the mechanisms that public institutions use to acquire information and tools, services and expertise.
Public tenders invite bidders through a wide array of formats, from PDFs and images of scanned documents to intricate spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel. Sometimes, it is all of the above. Taken individually, these differences in formats may seem like innocent papercuts. But when they add up together, they can cause fatal bleeds. They make drafting a proposal a complex, labour-intensive process that becomes a bottleneck in a procurement workflow and a barrier for entry to smaller companies.
Because documentation is fragmented, a proposal requires multiple steps: organising hundreds of pages of unstructured documentation, extracting hundreds of data points, analysing requirements, exclusion criteria, and assessment criteria. A single mistake can disqualify an entire application, requiring near-zero fault tolerance.
Can’t Artificial Intelligence solve this tangle? Speaking with Leonard Wossnig, co-founder of an AI startup focused on improving government operations, I learnt that proper automation requires being able to cope with this breadth of inputs. Procurement comes in the form of complex documents, especially complex tables and lengthy PDFs.
This fragmentation of formats holds strong resistance to conventional automation, which traditional software solutions cannot overcome. Now, AI-based solutions must employ a multi-stage, AI-driven pipeline that first performs layout segmentation to identify and classify distinct elements, then processes these elements through a dedicated pipeline, and finally uses Natural Language Processing to refine and contextualise data.
Right now, one the biggest technical barriers to bringing greater intelligence into government processes is made of PDFs, .jpgs, .xcl, and a host of other templates. In the meantime, cutting through this administrative jungle takes lawyers, engineers, and even dedicated compliance companies, resulting in slow motions and disproportionate costs.
One might argue that such complexity is legitimate because public money needs to be dispatched only after serious checks. But scaring away startups and small and medium enterprises with excessive administrative complexity can create monopolies. It also reduces the supply of services to the public sector to less innovative offering, because incumbents are better equipped to answer tenders than insurgents. This happens on a small and large scale: in the European Union, much of the extraordinary €750 billion COVID recovery and resilience fund remains unused because of this complexity. In the United States, nearly 80% of US defence revenue is produced by 10 companies, according to a report by the Financial Times.
2. Outsourcing Stuff Rather Than Insourcing Skills
In public systems, a given budget must be spent within a given term, usually yearly. If the unit with the budget does not use it on time, it loses it. You don’t use it, you don’t need it— the logic goes. This mechanism creates a perverse incentive that leads to wasteful or, at least, inefficient employment of public funds.
Significant sums are usually left unspent as deadlines approach because procurement systems are slow and stuck in their impenetrable jungles of requirements — see above. As a result, budget-owners rush to find ways to spend budgets so they don’t decrease their allocations for the next year. Sellers are waiting for this moment like predators eyeing a limping bison during the Great Migration.
To spend fast, officials must take the path of least resistance. This means giving money to companies with a framework contract in place, for a project that would raise little eyebrows, such as a study. Who would oppose running a new study? A study is one of the most innocent cases I have personally experienced. Yet, how many of these studies are being run simultaneously to lock in future budgets come Christmas time? No matter how small the amount spent on a single study, these costs will compound.
These outsourcing exercises are double whammies. On the one hand, they add little expertise to the public sector because they are outsourced hastily to consulting companies. These consultancies often have little specific expertise and many incentives to get the job done with minimum resources; their primary interest is not saving taxpayers money but growing margins.
On the other hand, outsourced money could be re-invested in upskilling the public sector workforce. Salaries for top talent could be made more competitive to attract the best candidates to the most important public sector jobs. At a time when governments need more technology and technologists, unused funds could be aggregated in a talent attraction scheme that raises the bar of public sector competitiveness.
Restoring the Divine, Reforming the Mundane
This is Poseidon’s paradox: institutional inertia lets divine talent decay, while public funds are invested in outsourcing competencies. Our Poseidons are left to administer complexity:
[Thus,] Poseidon became bored with the sea. He let fall his trident. Silently he sat on the rocky coast and a gull, dazed by his presence, described wavering circles around his head.”
This is not the time to reduce public sector resources, but to re-invest them smartly. Governments, in general, and Europeans, in particular, need divine talent to build competitiveness in innovation and defence. Such talent may already be in their halls. Now is the best moment to heal the papercuts, reverse the outflows of resources, and invest in public sector talent. Homegrown excellence is the best antidote to Poseidon’s paradox.