Why Movies Suck and Why Bureaucracy Is Inefficient, All In One Unifying Theory

I have a tip that will help you understand life’s big picture. I’m not kidding; a lot of the reasons behind all the world’s badnesses snapped into focus for me once I internalized this idea.

But internalizing this idea involves kicking some other bad ideas out the door.

The bad idea is this: People make decisions based on what they believe will be the best option.

You’ve got a movie producer making a movie? He’s choosing the best script, the best actors! You’ve got some middle management guy deciding what manufacturer he’s sourcing his goods? He’s choosing the best manufacturer!

For years, I believed this - and chalked up any terrible outcomes to a differing definition of “best.” I thought the best movie would be a fantastic new intellectual property with great writing - but they wanted a Transformers sequel directed by Michael Bay.

Or, sometimes, I thought it was just the decisions of people too incompetent to know what was best. If some company chose a slipshod supplier who delivered bad goods late, well, someone was just awful at understanding what made a good supplier.

But that wasn’t what was happening at all.

See, people might make decisions based on what they believe is the best outcome… so long as they don’t have management over their heads to punish them for bad outcomes.

The minute you add in layers of management second-guessing them, most people stop choosing the best option.

Wanna know what the actual rule is?

People make decisions based on whatever will get them the least blame when things go wrong.

And boy oh boy, that’s a different thought process.

The folks in the middle layers of management who signed off on Michael Bay directing another Transformers movie didn’t necessarily think that Michael Bay was the best director, or that the Transformers movies would be profitable (though they were!)…

They believed that if Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon failed, they could point to their decision and go, “B-but it was Michael Bay directing! He’s produced tons of money-making pictures! And Transformers, who would have thought that a recognizable brand like Transformers would fail us?”

And their bosses would grumble… but they probably wouldn’t fire them.

Whereas they know that if they signed the check to film an entirely new intellectual property from some hotshot arthouse director and that bombed, management would come knocking on their door looking for someone to blame. And those decisions would not be nearly as defensible - “You tried an untested property, without a bestselling book or a musical to base it on? And hired a director without a proven track record?”

And so the hatchet would fall upon their noggins.

The truth is that most decisions in a large organization are not made primarily by quality, but by how justifiable the decision will be seen in hindsight by their managers. If a company hires a slipshod supplier, it’s probably because one high-up manager was golf buddies with the supply company owner, and everyone downstream said “Screw it, this isn’t bad enough to risk my career on.”

In circumstances like these, I find it’s rare that the people don’t know that something is about to be terrible - or so poorly-researched that “terrible” is merely one of a number of things it could be.

Yet that decision gets made because if they sign off on it, nobody will blame them.

So if you’re wondering why Hollywood is plagued by sequels and reboots, well, nobody lost their job signing off on a new Transformers movie, the Transformers movies were successful, how could we have known Transformers One would bomb?

And you’re wondering why a specific bureaucracy signed off on some staggeringly stupid policy, it’s probably because several layers of middle management looked at a clueless decision made by a clueless upper management and said, “If I fight this tooth and nail and things get worse, I’ll be blamed for whatever happens. But if I shrug and say, ‘Looks fine to me,’ then upper management will get blamed if this goes sour.”

And bam! Bad policies out the door. (Well, that and a healthy dose of “Management doesn’t have to live under these new policies, only the plebes.”)

Now, of course that’s not everybody - I know someone’s scratchin’ at the keyboard right now, eager to tell me how they always strive to make the right decision. And good for you! But in general, I don’t believe most people do decide on the “best” outcome; most folks just look to keep their heads down and let the shit roll downstream over them.

In fact, once you start looking around, you’ll come to see that a lot of life’s low-grade annoyances are a vexing intersection of “Management won’t get blamed for it” and “Our clients aren’t irritated enough to change their behavior.” Are airline seats small and uncomfortable and have no luggage space? Sure. But upper management will never get blamed for trying to squeeze more money out of each flight… and just as importantly, it’s not like most people are saying, “I’ll spend extra to book on the airline that treats me well! I will have brand loyalty!”

Nope. Pretty much everyone just searches for the cheapest possible flight, and so there’s no reward in it for the airlines trying to be better. And without pushback, the policy stays put.

So if you’re trying to make change, the lesson is this:

You need to make that company’s bad decision into such a risk that it looks like it’ll be less blame for middle management if they reverse the policy.

That doesn’t mean you yell at middle management or, God forbid, the poor schmucks working customer service - it means that the only way to combat bad policy is by creating enough friction that it ripples upstream, bypassing all the layers of uncaring bureaucracy to start chafing the people who actually made the decision in the first place.

‘Course, that’s tough to do. It involves getting a lot of people on your side. And if it’s politics you’re looking to upset, it means you’ll either have to alienate people who were once loyal supporters of your opponent (because in this new modern political era, pleasing the opposition means nothing so long as you can pander to your base and keep a grip on that 51% majority), or to create enough hubbub that the policy’s too much trouble for them to enforce.

Guess which one’s more effective in an oligarchy?

Just a thought to help guide some of your decisions through the next couple of years.

Hey, my series The Dragon Kings of Oklahoma is still out there and available to read! Only $2.99 a pop! Quick, fast reading featuring adorable baby dragons and a cynical, quick-thinking protagonist, and my fans say it may be their favorite thing I’ve written! So hey, if you haven’t already, click the link and buy that sucker!

So. In a past newsletter, I asked you folks which of two books you’d prefer - and to my immense surprise, you did not pick the kinky one. No, you picked the one that’s more like The Sol Majestic - a sweeping generational epic about the building of a magic portal. The book is called, tentatively, The Sundering Gates.

The problem with The Sundering Gates is that it’s a really big book - like, “Bigger than the first book in Game of Thrones” sized. I wrote it for my wife Gini during COVID, reading her each chapter as I went along; I had no end game and no serious plans of publishing it, so I didn’t care how long the damn thing ran.

I don’t feel like splitting it into smaller chunks, because I think the story benefits from being told without artificial cliffhangers. And I am a little leery of publishing a huge book that I’m not sure if people would finish. I mean, a publisher would probably tell me “Make it a trilogy” or something, but that’s exactly why I want to self-publish.

I need my ability to make bold artistic decisions, even if they’re stupid!

But then someone in my Discord (you’re welcome to join, btdubs) suggested, “Why not publish it on Royal Road?”

Which, you know, I’d heard about, mainly through anecdotes from strangers like “My niece makes good money publishing on Royal Road.” It’s basically a place where people publish serialized webnovels, sometimes for profit, sometimes for kicks. It’s had some huge successes, most notably in LitRPG books.

I liked that idea. I liked the idea of people consuming this book the same way my wife fell in love with it - one chapter at a time, spaced out over several weeks. And I liked the idea of combining social media with my writing - Royal Road’s got subscribers, and followers, and having a site that encourages traffic to other readers could potentially hook me into a larger audience than I normally command.

…or it could be the wrong fit. I’ve heard some folks saying it’s not as friendly to LGBTQ topics as it could be - and The Sundering Gates isn’t exactly homoromantic, but it’s got a polyamorous lesbian struggling with a bisexual wife who wants a baby, a genderqueer priesthood who give up their genders as God intended, and several background gay couples.

Furthermore, having perused Royal Road, it’s mostly aimed at quick reads and a younger audience - fast-starting LitRPG and Progression Fantasies, with fairly simple prose. (That’s not a ding - there’s an art to writing both transparent prose and fast-moving plots, one I largely lack.) I know there’s other stuff there, a lot of other stuff - but that does not appear to be the popular stuff…

Accent on appears. I’ve been mostly poking around the site, taking nibbles of the various fictions here and there. And I think it’d be kinda fun to do a week-by-week style of storytelling on a site that’s not my own… unless nobody read it, in which case I’d probably be in for months of committed misery.

So that’s where you come in! Do you read Royal Road… or would you follow me there if I started posting what is perhaps the best book I’ve written yet? Or would you be more like, “Screw it, Ferrett, I want it all in one place, I’ll pay you the $3.99 to slog through it.” If it’s published serially, I might finally start up a Patreon where I post chapters in advance of the rest of the story.

(“Post it elsewhere” or “Post it yourself” will not be helpful, alas. I’ve looked at the alternatives and have decided it’s basically A or B, take yer choice.)

So! Lemme know. Tell me what you know, and more importantly what you feel, on these options. Be realistic. If you’ve got experience in RR stuff, either in producing or consuming, weigh in. And I’ll probably publish The Sundering Gates, oh, in a few months somewhere.

Hopefully with a better title.