Before the pandemic, when Burning Man was in its “High Culture” phase, there was a strong sense that the kind of organizational systems and bureaucracy that work for conventional organizations won’t work well for this culture … and so while we needed systems, we also needed to find a way to “make bureaucracy Burning Man compliant.” Today, with Burning Man in its “Diaspora” phase, we have that same need — just from the opposite direction. Burning Man needs systems that “feel like Burning Man,” that seem native to our culture, in order to keep people connected, keep from reinventing the wheel, support best practices, and help us be greater than the sum of our parts.
In 2017 and 2018 I held a series of workshops with Burning Man staff and volunteers to ask: what would systems like that look like? How do we imagine a “Burning Man compliant bureaucracy would work?”
These are the ideas we came up with, some of which I’ve written about before, some of which are presented for the first time.
What We Do When We’re Doing It Right
How do we make bureaucracy Burning Man compliant? We begin by examining Burning Man culture itself, the way Larry did when he established the 10 Principles. We’re not trying to impose our vision of what a “good bureaucracy” is, we’re asking: when Burning Man is working, when everyone is contributing and enjoying themselves and only overworked in meaningful ways … what is it that’s happening? What are the conditions when we get this right? What is our system like when it is working in line with our culture?
We concluded that the experience of volunteering for Burning Man — when we’re doing it right — succeeds so spectacularly because volunteers access and experience five things that are usually hoarded at the very top of organizations (if they’re offered at all). Over time, I would come to call these “RACER” qualities, mostly because the acronym was sitting right there. They are:
- Relevance – People, and the work they’re doing, really matter, and is respected as such.
- Agency – People can behave according to their personal values, choose the kind of work they do, and (to the extent humanly possible) how they want to do it
- Competence – People can bring their full capacities to tasks, and if they are able to do better than the system is set up for, they can change the system to accommodate their talents
- Relatedness – People get to make meaningful social connections and develop social currency
- Engagement – People are interacting with people and things that aren’t bland, that show personality and distinction, and they themselves can show personality and be distinct
When we are able to both experience and do these things, the experience “feels like Burning Man” or at least “rhymes with Burning Man.” Therefore our processes should be designed in such a way as to generate and spread these experiences. Much in the way that people are willing to put up with incredible inconvenience at Burning Man if they see it as a meaningful part of their experience, if it feels like Burning Man, bureaucracy that feels like Burning Man will be seen as part of the experience, rather than something taking them away from the experience, or blocking it entirely.
For a deeper look at these qualities and how they’re used, read the Burning Man Journal article: “Don’t Bogart That Leadership — Burning Man is not a Zero Sum Game.” (Note that this post is from much earlier in the process, before Engagement was added. Otherwise it’s in line with this discussion.) Leaders in Burning Man culture are fundamentally not people who make decisions for other people, but who help other people access these qualities in the work they do. That’s what our bureaucracy needs to do too.
What Does Applying RACER to Bureaucracy Look Like in Practice?
That’s what we have to figure out, but here are the initial design recommendations that the workshops developed:
- Make sure people involved in the processes have the possibility of establishing and using social capital. If they can’t develop social capital by feeling connected, and allowing others to feel connected to them, it’s going to feel that much less like Burning Man.
- Turn bureaucracy into narrative.
- Weave a sense of purpose into documents, so people can understand why the forms they’re filling out and the processes they’re going through matter. If the process cannot be easily explained, then can engaging with it be made more intuitive or engaging? If the process cannot be easily explained, made intuitive, or engaging, then perhaps the process itself should be examined. It might be a bad process for us.
- Use communication techniques ranging from documents to infographics to make our processes transparent. The only surprises should be delightful ones.
- Where possible, tell a simple “story” of how this process works to make it more intuitive
- Give paperwork and processes a playful voice, and provide opportunities for the person engaging with them to be playful in turn. Make paperwork an art project.
- Provide acknowledgement and recognition, as part of the process, of the important work people are doing by participating in this system.
- Ask for voluntary sublimation — get expressed buy-in about the process they’re going to go through. Restrictions on autonomy are subjectively much less onerous if they’re something you affirmatively choose, rather than something that is imposed upon you. So give people opportunities to actively buy-in. If someone learns about the process and says “no, that doesn’t sound like me,” then maybe we can’t help them, but we can still encourage their exploration of ways to do things outside our system. When people decide they’re better off doing things outside our system, the correct response is not dismissal but to ask: “How can we help?” and “What can we learn?”
- NO BUSY WORK! First choice: kill meaningless systems! Automate the meaningful but repetitive. If neither can be achieved, communicate the underlying value of the work and turn it into an art project so it’s meaningful instead of busy.
- Allow for flexible reassignment of duties and roles. We may not be able to offer people every choice they want to make, but if they are able to make choices and try new tasks and new roles, then buy-in and sublimation are much more likely.
- Support autonomy in other areas. Some processes may require you to do what we tell you, the way we tell you, but you can do it in a onesie. You can choose your own name. You can play your own music while you do it, or have a DJ performing and a fluffer bringing you drinks during the task. This is, to be sure, window dressing — but sometimes it helps.
- Give processes a personal face. Where possible, avoid impersonal touches like a “feedback@” type email address, or “the committee will review” language — instead, give the person or team at the other end of the system a personality.
- Give role and process histories. How was this developed, by whom, and why? Not only provide a historical story and context, but make this something that one can join by engaging.
That’s what we’ve got as bullet points. In the next (and last?) post in this sequence, I’ll talk about my own experiences trying to implement approaches like these, and how they did (and didn’t) work out.
Cover image of “The Corporate Ladder” by Michael Spraker Night Visions Studios, 2022 (Photo by Ales Prikryl)