It's close, the purpose of bureaucracy is better controls, auditability, accountability, and security. All of those not only take time, they are "made up" of time. There's a trade-off with efficiency, it's inherent to the problem. The faster you do something, the less chance you have to prevent catastrophe. So, if you slow things down, intentionally, you have a better chance of making the right decisions.

It's why approval processes exist. If everyone was perfectly aligned and made no mistakes, then we would never need approval processes for, say, customer data. We would just allow even the lowest on the ladder to access any data they want, whenever they want, no questions asked. And it would be fine, because they would only use it to make their job faster, no downside. But it doesn't work that way in reality. In reality, we have to purposefully slow things down so we get a chance to reflect.

> It's close, the purpose of bureaucracy is better controls, auditability, accountability, and security. All of those not only take time, they are "made up" of time. There's a trade-off with efficiency, it's inherent to the problem. The faster you do something, the less chance you have to prevent catastrophe.

Except that the trade off is frequently a false dichotomy. Some of the best and most effective controls are automated systems. The audit logs from a computer are dramatically more likely to be accurate than ones filled out on paper by hand. A pressure relief valve doesn't get the flu and then have someone filling in for them who isn't as experienced at doing it manually.

The slower you do something, the more likely you are to miss something important because you exhausted your time/resources on something unimportant, or that the process gets burdensome enough to cause the people on the ground to bypass it in its entirety.

It's also common for the output of a process to itself be critical for safety, security, health, etc., and then any delays to the process make its output unavailable when its output being available can be a matter of life or death. This one is especially hard to see in a bureaucratic environment because people frequently aren't aware of everything which is downstream of them that they could be holding up.