[jammies]

Any large organization will have inefficiencies and waste. It is inevitable because organizations have to employ people, and people will find a way to extract the maximum value from their minimum effort inside any system that other people can devise.

Making policies and procedures handle edge cases and exploits makes the systems more complex, and complexity adds inefficiency. This is how bureaucracies develop seemingly interminable and unnecessary red tape, and why reforming processes to get rid of such complexity often leads to unintended consequences that may be worse than leaving the red tape in place.

For example, let's say that the city department in charge of grading the roads no longer grades according to a schedule, but rather someone has to go out and decide which roads need to be graded. Instead of the inefficiency of grading roads that don't need it, now you have the inefficiency of grader crews waiting on someone's word to go ahead. Or maybe you let the grader crews make their own decisions, and some crews will decide to leave roads untouched that need grading, then citizens call in to complain, and now you have to send out another grader, which is a different kind of waste. No matter what system you implement, entropy and friction always win.

This isn't to say that some organizations aren't more efficient than others. However, if you're going to complain about a particular organization, you should have more than a cursory understanding of how that organization compares to similar organizations of the same size, and what systemic changes would improve it - not just populist platitudes and contextless anecdotes.