Bureaucratic organizations are inertial, incremental, and dispiriting. In a bureaucracy, the power to initiate change is vested in a few senior leaders. When those at the top fall prey to denial, arrogance, and nostalgia, as they often do, the organization falters. That’s why deep change in a bureaucracy is usually belated and convulsive. Bureaucracies are also innovation-phobic. They are congenitally risk averse, and offer few incentives to those inclined to challenge the status quo. In a bureaucracy, being a maverick is a high-risk occupation. Worst of all, bureaucracies are soul crushing. Deprived of any real influence, employees disconnect emotionally from work. Initiative, creativity, and daring—requisites for success in the creative economy—often get left at home.

Third, like nuclear power plants and space rockets, bureaucracies are complex, integrated systems. Every process is connected to every other process. This lack of modularity makes it difficult to change one thing without changing everything. Where do you start? That’s the paradox of change in a bureaucracy: what seems doable isn’t transformational and what’s transformational doesn’t seem doable. The result: an endless succession of tweaks that never succeed in making the organization fundamentally more capable.

So, let’s face facts.

BUREAUCRACY IS FAMILIAR. You won’t have the courage to take on bureaucracy unless you believe there are alternatives. We must search out organizations that have successfully defied management orthodoxy.

BUREAUCRACY IS COMPLEX AND SYSTEMIC. Fragmented, half-hearted attempts won’t cut it. We need to replace the entire edifice of bureaucracy—one stone at a time.

BUREAUCRACY IS WELL DEFENDED. There will be resistance, so management rebels need to join forces. You have to build a grassroots movement that can overwhelm or route around the defenders of the status quo.

BUREAUCRACY SERVES A PURPOSE, HOWEVER POORLY. The goal is to carefully dismantle bureaucracy, not simply blow it up. You need a change strategy that is both audacious and prudent.

BUREAUCRACY IS SELF-REPLICATING. There will be no easy victories. Bureaucrats will fight back. To persevere, you’ll need a sense of purpose that’s as unshakable as the path is arduous.

There’s a final threat to subtlety: bureaucrats abhor ambiguity. Their sense of order is offended by the idea that not every trade-off can be resolved once and for all. Uniformity is a virtue. Never mind that any universally applied policy will be wrong a significant percentage of the time—as when an across-the-board hiring freeze unfairly punishes a small but fast-growing unit, or a zealously enforced policy inconveniences a high-value customer. The alternative would be to grant those on the frontlines the freedom to optimize trade-offs locally, as circumstances dictate. To a bureaucrat, this is anathema, since it erodes “order.” How can you manage a large organization if people on the ground are free to do their own damn thing? We need to know what’s going on, and that’s possible only when everyone’s following the same script. This, as much as anything, explains why senior leaders favor uniform structures and uniformly applied policies—yes, they may be suboptimal, but they reduce the cognitive load on executive leaders. They make the world seem understandable to those at the top, and thereby help to preserve the illusion of control.

Bureaucracy, as we’ve noted, is a game. It pits contestants against one another in a battle for positional power and the rewards that come with it. We have no problem with competition—unless winning comes at the cost of one’s humanity. Bureaucracy will start to crumble when talented and principled people walk off the playing field; when big-hearted heretics decide to forgo bureaucratic wins for the sake of their own integrity, and for the sake of those who’ve been diminished by bureaucracy. As Harvard professor Marshall Ganz notes, the goal of people who change the world is “not winning the game, but changing the rules.