The Rhesus Chart (Laundry Files, #5)

by Charles Stross

The five stages of bureaucratic grieving are: denial, anger, committee meetings, scapegoating, and cover-up.

We use committees for all the ulterior purposes for which they might have been designed: diffusion of executive responsibility, plausible deniability, misdirection, providing the appearance of activity without the substance, and protecting the guilty.