Ontology, Taxonomy & Bureaucracy

Large systems do not run on truth. They run on shared fictions that allow strangers to coordinate at scale. Money is a fiction. Corporations are fictions. Nations are fictions. They are not imaginary in the sense of being unreal, but they exist only because enough people believe in the same classification of reality. This is the nature of intersubjectivity.

Bureaucracy, who’s literal translation means rule by desk, is the machinery that stabilises those shared fictions. It translates abstract categories into durable procedures. It ensures that “a dollar”, “a department”, or “a compliance breach” mean the same thing across thousands of people who will never meet.

Seen this way, bureaucracy is not stupidity. It is compression. It reduces a messy world into legible units that can be counted, approved, audited and repeated.

The issue arises when the fiction hardens.

Side note: a traditional bureau has many drawers into which different pieces of paper are placed and processed, hence the term.

Information networks scale by standardising meaning. Once a classification becomes widely accepted, it enables coordination at enormous scale. But the same stabilising force makes adaptation slow. Institutions continue to act as if the categories that once worked still map cleanly onto reality.

This is where ontology enters. Ontology asks what actually exists in the system. What are the real flows? What are the real constraints? What is causally doing the work?

Traditional organisations assume that finance exists as a distinct domain. That marketing exists. That operations exists. These are not natural species. They are taxonomic decisions embedded in policy, reporting lines and software.

The taxonomy is then enforced bureaucratically through budgets, committees and approval pathways. The question is whether those symbols still correspond to the environment the organisation inhabits.

When AI compresses feedback loops and collapses information asymmetry, the old categories begin to blur. Capital allocation and demand creation are no longer sequential activities. Decision cycles shorten. Data flows cut across departmental lines. The fiction of stable, separable domains becomes harder to sustain.

Yet the bureaucracy remains intact because it is anchored to yesterday’s ontology. What looks like inefficiency is often a deeper misalignment. The organisation is optimising inside a classification scheme that no longer reflects how value is created.

This is why the conversation about the future of organisation design cannot start with structure charts or cultural slogans. It has to start with ontology. What exists now that did not exist before? What has stopped existing but is still being protected by policy and tradition?

If finance and marketing were once distinct domains, that distinction made sense in a world of slower signals and more rigid capital flows. If those constraints dissolve, the separation may become artificial. In another world perhaps people would refer to the “Finanting Department”…

The point of this article is not to attack bureaucracy. It is to recognise that bureaucracy is an enforcement layer built on classification, and classification rests on ontological commitments.

Change the commitments and the categories must change. Change the categories and the processes must follow. The next organisational shift will not begin with removing layers. It will begin with redefining what is real inside the system.

“Finanting” is not a clever hybrid. It is a question about whether our inherited categories still correspond to the flows that actually determine performance. If they do not, the fiction will eventually fracture. And when shared fictions fracture, coordination becomes expensive again.

The serious work, therefore, is not dismantling bureaucracy. It is interrogating the ontology that bureaucracy is currently defending.

This article is a precursor to a new series on redefining the organisation for a new age and has been influenced by the works of Yuval Harari.