Why is everything so hard in a large organisation?

A user posted a link to an article on Hacker News discussing the question 'why is everything so hard in a large organization?'. I found a reply comment by another user interesting. Reproducing it here word by word.

"It's hard because it's meant to be hard.

Once you have a large org that's making money, you don't really know exactly why it makes money. Sure, there's annual filings and there's still the elevator pitch of what the org does. But the actual how of how it works is difficult to describe in causal terms: if team X or Y was not there, the business would do better/worse? How does this team interact with that? It's really a bunch of informal relationships between different people, and both the people and the relationships change over time.

So what you want to do when you know the whole sorta-works and you want to keep it that way is you pour glue all over it. You try to formalize processes, you give people titles and you make hierarchies. That way you attempt to stop the firm from inadvertently slipping into dysfunction.

The side effect is of course that everyone who works there can see ways to improve things, but they can't see a way to get those improvements implemented."