What Moving Between Countries Teaches You About Systems

Why institutions become most visible when we encounter unfamiliar ones

One of the strange things about moving to a new country is that you have to learn how to live again.

Not in the dramatic sense. In very ordinary ways.

How do you register an address? How do you pay for something? What happens when your child starts school? If you need an official document, do you visit an office, send an email, download an app, or simply wait for the system to contact you?

None of these questions seems particularly important until you don't know the answer.

I have lived, studied or spent meaningful periods of my life in different countries. Every move has involved learning a new set of written and unwritten rules. Over time, this has made me increasingly interested in something I rarely thought about when I was younger: systems.

Many institutions are easiest to notice when something stops working as expected. Moving countries provides another way of seeing them. Even when everything works, you notice the system because you do not yet know how it works.

And that can teach us something.

We live inside institutions

The economist Douglass North described institutions as the humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic and social interaction (North, 1991).

Some are formal: laws, regulations, property rights and official procedures.

Others are informal: customs, expectations, conventions and ways of behaving that everybody seems to understand without anyone explaining them.

For someone who has lived in the same environment for a long time, many of these rules become almost invisible.

You know where to go. You know what document to bring. You know whether an appointment at 10:00 really means 10:00. You know whether an email will receive a response. You know when a verbal agreement is enough and when something needs to be written down.

Then you move.

Suddenly, things that were automatic become questions.

That experience has made me think that one of the easiest ways to understand a system is to become temporarily unfamiliar with it.

The hidden cost of figuring things out

Public administration researchers have a useful concept for some of this: administrative burden.

Moynihan, Herd and Harvey (2015) describe three types of costs people can experience when interacting with government.

Learning costs are the effort required to find out what you need to do.

Compliance costs are the time and effort required to actually do it: filling in forms, providing documents, attending appointments or completing procedures.

Psychological costs include stress, frustration, stigma or a loss of autonomy.

This framework changed the way I think about bureaucracy.

A procedure can be perfectly logical from the perspective of the institution and still be difficult from the perspective of the person using it.

Consider something as simple as submitting a document.

The administrative requirement might take five minutes.

But first you have to discover that the requirement exists. Then determine which document is accepted. Then find where to obtain it. Then understand where to submit it.

The form may take five minutes. The system may have taken two hours.

Figure 1. A person's journey through a system

Where friction appears — and what it means

Figure 1. Learning, compliance and psychological costs are adapted from Moynihan, Herd and Harvey (2015). Interaction and outcome represent additional elements discussed in this article. Some friction may be deliberate, including verification, review and appeal.

The three forms of administrative burden provide a useful starting point. But when thinking about my own experiences with unfamiliar systems, I find three additional questions useful: how institutions coordinate, whether people trust the process, and where the complexity of the system ultimately falls.

COORDINATION

Why can't these offices coordinate?

How institutions exchange information.

TRUST

Can I rely on this process?

Expectations about consistency and impartiality.

SYSTEM DESIGN

Why was that surprisingly easy?

Where the complexity of the process has been placed.

These are not categories from the administrative-burden framework. They are simply questions I have found useful when thinking about systems from the user's perspective.

The last one interests me most.

Good systems can hide their complexity

When a system feels simple, it does not necessarily mean the system itself is simple.

Often the opposite is true.

Behind a straightforward interaction may sit databases, laws, organizational responsibilities, security controls, payment infrastructure and information exchanges that the user never sees.

The complexity still exists.

Someone has simply decided where it should sit.

This has led me to a principle I have gradually come to appreciate:

A good system does not necessarily eliminate complexity. It prevents unnecessary complexity from being transferred to the person using it.

This becomes particularly interesting as more public services move online.

Digitalization can reduce paperwork, travel and waiting. But research on digital administrative burden suggests that learning and psychological costs may be especially prevalent when interactions move online (Peeters, 2023).

A confusing form on a screen is still a confusing form.

A person who cannot determine which digital service to use still faces a learning cost.

In other words, digitization and simplification are not the same thing.

Institutions are also people

There is another complication.

We often talk about “the system” as though it were a machine.

But institutions are implemented by people.

Michael Lipsky's influential work on street-level bureaucracy drew attention to the role of frontline public servants who interact directly with people and exercise discretion while working within organizational rules and constraints (Lipsky, 1980).

More recent research reinforces the importance of this human dimension. A systematic review of 119 articles and working papers found that factors such as frontline service delivery and government communication can influence how people experience administrative burdens (Halling & Bækgaard, 2024).

This means two people can encounter the same institution and experience it differently.

One person explains an unfamiliar procedure patiently.

Another assumes that everybody already knows it.

One interprets a rule rigidly.

Another helps someone understand how to comply with it.

The formal rule may be identical.

The experience of the system is not.

This becomes particularly visible when you are new to a country because you ask questions that long-term residents may no longer need to ask.

Trust changes everything

There is another feature of systems that is difficult to see: trust.

Rothstein and Teorell (2008) argue that quality of government can be understood through the impartiality of institutions exercising public authority — the principle that officials apply rules without improperly favouring particular people or groups.

For the person dealing with an institution, that principle also has a practical dimension.

Do I expect the same procedure to apply to me as to somebody else?

If an official tells me something, do I expect it to be accurate?

If I submit a document, do I expect it to be processed?

If the system makes a mistake, do I believe there is a functioning way to correct it?

When people can rely on those expectations, they can spend less energy navigating uncertainty.

Trust, in that sense, has practical value.

But trust should not mean blind confidence. Good institutions also need transparency, accountability and ways to challenge decisions.

Perhaps the strongest systems are therefore those in which people do not have to depend entirely on either personal relationships or blind institutional faith. They can rely on understandable rules, consistent processes and functioning mechanisms for correcting mistakes.

Friction is not always failure

It is tempting to conclude that every additional administrative requirement is evidence of bad design.

I don't think that is right.

Sometimes friction serves a legitimate purpose.

A bank should not make it effortless for someone to access another person's account.

Important decisions may require documentation or review. Public resources need safeguards. Privacy needs protection. People affected by decisions may need opportunities to challenge them.

Removing every administrative step could make a system faster while making it less secure, accountable or fair.

And this is an area where the research itself is not finished. Researchers reviewing the administrative-burden literature have called for more evidence on the trade-offs between legitimacy and the burdens people experience (Halling & Bækgaard, 2024).

So the useful question is not:

How can we remove every burden?

It is:

Which burdens are necessary, who carries them, and could the same objective be achieved with less burden on the person using the system?

That is a much harder design problem.

Moving makes the invisible visible

This may be the most important thing moving between countries has taught me about systems.

There is rarely one obvious way to organize ordinary life.

Things that feel completely natural in one place can be organized differently somewhere else.

That does not automatically mean one country is right and another is wrong.

Institutions develop through history. They reflect different legal traditions, resources, technologies, political choices and social expectations. North's work emphasizes this historical dimension: institutions develop over time, connecting past arrangements with present ones (North, 1991).

But comparison is still valuable.

Not because it allows us to create a league table of countries.

It allows us to ask a better question:

Why is it done this way?

Once you have seen the same basic problem solved several different ways, the existing solution stops looking inevitable.

And that is where comparison becomes useful.

The view from the other side of the counter

There is one final lesson I have taken from moving.

When we understand a system well, it is easy to underestimate how difficult it is for someone encountering it for the first time.

Instructions that seem obvious may only be obvious because we have followed them before.

A website that seems intuitive may only be intuitive because we understand its terminology.

An acronym that saves an organization ten seconds can cost an outsider ten minutes.

This is not unique to government. The same problem appears in companies, universities, hospitals, banks and almost every large organization.

People inside systems gradually acquire institutional knowledge.

Then they begin designing processes for people who do not have it.

Perhaps one useful test of a well-designed system is therefore surprisingly simple:

Can someone who does not already understand the system successfully use it?

That question changes the perspective.

Instead of asking whether the procedure works from the organization's side of the counter, we start asking whether it works from the other side.

Conclusion

Moving between countries has not taught me which country has the perfect system.

I don't think such a system exists.

What it has taught me is to notice systems.

To notice how much knowledge they demand from people. How complexity is distributed. How formal rules interact with human discretion. How trust changes the experience. And how practices that seem completely natural are often simply one way of organizing things among many possibilities.

Most of the time, institutions operate quietly in the background of our lives.

We notice the train, not the transport system.

The appointment, not the administrative architecture behind it.

The document, not the institutions that make other people accept it.

Moving somewhere new temporarily removes that invisibility.

You become a beginner again.

And perhaps that is one of the most useful perspectives from which to understand any system.

References

Halling, A., & Bækgaard, M. (2024). Administrative burden in citizen–state interactions: A systematic literature review. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 34(2), 180–195. https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muad023

Lipsky, M. (1980). Street-level bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the individual in public services. Russell Sage Foundation.

Moynihan, D., Herd, P., & Harvey, H. (2015). Administrative burden: Learning, psychological, and compliance costs in citizen-state interactions. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 25(1), 43–69. https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muu009

North, D. C. (1991). Institutions. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 5(1), 97–112. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.5.1.97

Peeters, R. (2023). Digital administrative burdens: An agenda for analyzing the citizen experience of digital bureaucratic encounters. Perspectives on Public Management and Governance, 6(1), 7–13. https://doi.org/10.1093/ppmgov/gvac024

Rothstein, B., & Teorell, J. (2008). What is quality of government? A theory of impartial government institutions. Governance, 21(2), 165–190. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0491.2008.00391.x