When everything is important, nothing is important – the struggle of state institutions, including the University of Copenhagen, against Erlang and Kierkegaard
In the Danish state administration and at UCPH, a widespread disease prevails: “The project throng”. It is a state where political ambitions always exceed organisational capacity, and where the ability to say “yes” is seen as decisiveness, while a “no” is seen as a lack of vision. At UCPH, there are approximately just under 100 IT projects and about a total of 300 employees (including managers and supporters). You don’t have to be an actuarial mathematician to see that the crowd is above us.
If we look at this phenomenon through the lens of Søren Kierkegaard and A.K. Erlang, we discover that the inability of state institutions to opt out is not just a management problem – it is a mathematical and existential failure that can now be read directly in the statistics.
Søren Kierkegaard taught us that every supplementary subject is an opt-out. For the individual, this means that one must choose one path and leave the others behind in order to win himself and his direction. In state contexts, there is a consistent attempt to defy this constitution. One seeks a “both-and” in a reality that requires “either-or”. By starting ten strategic focus areas without closing the previous nine, the institution ends up in a state of organisational anxiety. When everything is made important, nothing really becomes important, and the strategic direction disappears in a fog of simultaneous priorities.
This is where the mathematician A.K. Erlang makes the existential pain measurable. Erlang’s queuing theory proves that a system has an unavoidable capacity limit. When we throw more projects onto the “assembly line” than there are hands to grab them, something insidious happens: The waiting time and resource consumption do not increase evenly – it explodes exponentially. We see this today in the fact that more than 60% of the state’s major projects are delayed. It is not necessarily a lack of diligence, but a mathematical inevitability; When the system is pushed towards 100% utilization, everything comes to a head in coordination and context switching.
The response of state institutions to this pressure is paradoxical. Instead of making the Kierkegaardian opt-out and cutting the project portfolio, they try to “steer” their way out of the chaos. This has led to a historic upgrading of the administration, which now counts over 101,000 full-time employees. More inspectors, project managers and coordinators are hired to keep track of the crowd, but the result is just more links in the food chain and more complex queuing systems. They try to fight Erlang’s law with more bureaucracy, but only end up feeding the machine with more complexity.
The price of this failure is ultimately human. The lack of prioritisation is spreading as stress among employees, with one in five employees in the state now reporting serious work pressure. The employees face the Kierkegaardian dilemma every day: They try to choose everything, but end up feeling that they are failing at everything.
The true drive, therefore, does not lie in launching the next big development project or hiring another coordinator. It lies in the courage to identify the projects that must die for the remaining ones to live. Without the courageous opt-out, the institutions’ opt-ins will only be a statistical noise that stifles both efficiency and job satisfaction.