Bureaucracy is interesting. People love to blame it for outcomes, which is fair, but when there's a catastrophic outcome, (not necessarily the same) people will also say that there should have been a rule, or better yet, the process that lead to the outcome should not have been possible.

In the spirit of curiosity, when I run into an especially irritating piece of bureaucracy, I like to try to think of the problems it was crafted to avoid. While that will rarely convince me that the current system is the best possible one, it does often convince me that the problem is harder than I thought.